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I've said this here before, but based on having dinner with him probably ten years ago now, the arXiv replaced the system that existed in the early 90's where people at top research universities would mail preprints to each other, as publishing was slow and waiting for preprints to be published would put you behind the curve by quite a long time. Obviously this was inefficient and somewhat exclusive (if you weren't at a university in the preprint exchange club, you'd be hopelessly behind in your field).

> My only complaint is that I don't particularly like PDF and wish there was an HTML-zip format that could be sent around and the browser did all the rendering work, while the udnerlying data tables are stored in well-defined formats so they can be programatically extracted.

Back when I was doing Math research it was common to submit LateX files to ArXiv. A quick look at some of the Physics papers, though, suggests it may not the case for other fields.

I'm in CS research, I submit all my papers as latex sources. Submitting pdfs that were obviously created in latex is supposedly against the rules.

MHTML is not going anywhere, but presumably you could do a single HTML file with all media as embedded data URIs?

It depends. arXiv won't normally accept a LaTeX-generated PDF, but it will accept a PDF written in Word.

Particle physicists, cosmologists and astrophysicists almost exclusively use LaTeX (anybody using Word would get laughed at). In other fields of physics, Word is more common and also not everyone submits everything to the arXiv. It's an interesting cultural divide...

I wrote my thesis in latex and convert to html in 1995. It’s still online, 27 years later, and totally readable! Only a few external image links are broken.

I don’t particularly like latex though.

> It depends. arXiv won't normally accept a LaTeX-generated PDF, but it will accept a PDF written in Word.

What do you mean? I predict the majority of PDFs on arxiv are generated from latex just based on the fields who mainly use it. In fact many papers contain the tex source files.

What I mean is, if you try to upload the PDF from LaTeX, it will complain and tell you to upload the sources (which it then compiles to a PDF).

> changing the terms to retain copyright), signed it and sent it back (no journal ever complained, and all his papers are available as PDFs online).

Assuming the journals signed it first, this is most likely illegal since they didn’t know they were signing under the different terms. If they sign it after the professor signs it, they technically have the duty to confirm the language is the same, but it still might be seen as a deceptive practice on the professor’s part.

I had this discussion with the professor in question. He had already consulted with his IP lawyers. As you say, they technically have the duty to confirm the language is the same, but we know they didn't because the paper was published with their copyright attached. I think he was trying to push the issue, gently, and hoped some published would make a stink.

Contracts are amended all the time in exactly this method. That’s how contracts work (IANAL so maybe I’ve missed something, but I was taught this by lawyer left)

Surely you are supposed to tell the other person if you are changing the contract though? Not a lawyer, but it's hard for me to believe that tricking someone into signing the wrong thing is an effective legal strategy.

If you just signed it, that would be indicating you accept it with no changes.

There is no reason to send it back aside from redlining something. So sending a new contract is itself the indication that it has been redlined.