keyword "SNAPSHOT" in depedency version is ignored

[Dr. Stefan Reisner]

I have created the following dependency in my maven project:

    <dependency>
      <groupId>commons-logging</groupId>
      <artifactId>commons-logging</artifactId>
      <version>SNAPSHOT</version>
    </dependency>

This results in the following behaviour being logged on the console when
invoking maven:

D:\workspace\de.syngenio.kompass.kik>maven
 __  __
|  \/  |__ _Apache__ ___
| |\/| / _` \ V / -_) ' \  ~ intelligent projects ~
|_|  |_\__,_|\_/\___|_||_|  v. 1.0.2

Attempting to download commons-logging-SNAPSHOT.jar.
WARNING: Failed to download commons-logging-SNAPSHOT.jar.

My expectation was that maven would replace SNAPSHOT (or for that any
version value in which "SNAPSHOT" occurs as a substring) by the most current
version available in the repository. What is going wrong here?

I should add that I'm new to maven, so it's probably something stupid
simple.

Best regards,
Dr. Stefan Reisner