Subject: Re: e-prints

From: categories <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 6 Dec 1997 16:12:56 -0400 (AST)

Date: Fri, 5 Dec 1997 13:19:58 -0800 (PST)
From: john baez <[email-masked]>

Jim Stasheff writes:
 
> you can input your macros directly into your tex file

But you don't need to.  You can also upload a bunch of
separate files using the uufiles program obtainable from 
the preprint archive.  It's painless and easy.

Information on this and a million other technical issues
is available at the archives themselves.  Try:

http://eprints.math.duke.edu/

or send email with subject header "help" to 

[email-masked]

> as for the plagarism issue, I will let the experts respond

I'm no expert, but I don't see what the problem is.  If you
upload your paper to one of these archives, the paper 
itself and the exact date and time it was first received is 
publicly accessible, so any attempt by anyone to plagiarize 
it would be incredibly easy to prove.  If you store your papers 
on your own site, it's much harder to prove you wrote them before 
someone else.  This is one reason why highly competitive
physicists rush to put their papers on the archives as
quickly as possible: to get a certified time stamp on their paper!

Anyway, I've never heard of any problems with plagiarism actually 
happening.

In case it's not been made sufficiently clear, the main
advantages of having all papers on a given subject stored
electronically at a single institution are:

1) they are easy to find
2) they are easy to refer to 
2) they stay there, archived, while the authors move from 
institution to institution and ultimately perish.  Will our 
institutions keep our websites going after we die, while 
technology continues to change?

Many of my papers (or pointers to them) appear on Ginsparg-style 
preprint archive, my own website, Hypatia, Mathematical Reviews, 
the category theory mailing list, and paper journals --- all of 
which serve different purposes.  Presumably some of these systems
will fall into disuse in a natural sort of way as time passes.  
I wouldn't advocate the brutal elimination of existing systems.
I think the question now is: would category theory be served by 
creation of a Ginsparg-style preprint archive for the subject?