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Comment by w-m | Hacker News Reader

Hey alphaxiv, you won’t let me claim some of my preprints, because there’s no match with the email address. Which there can’t be, as we’re only listing a generic first.last@org addresses in the papers. Tried the claiming process twice, nothing happened. Not all papers are on Orcid, so that doesn’t help.

I think it’ll be hard growing a discussion platform, if there’s barriers of entry like that to even populate your profile.

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How would you propose making claiming possible without the risk of hijacking/misrepresentation?

The data on which authors are part of which arxiv papers is already in the arXiv database, and in Google Scholar, and in other libraries. I appreciate that it's not an easy task to get that as a third party. But the burden should be on the operators of alphaxiv to figure out a solution for this platform to take off, not for me as a user?

Yea I agree it shouldn't be on you as a customer, was more asking out of curiosity.

I don't think Google scholar has this fully solved either, I've seen many misattributed papers there.

The only way I see this working is for paper authors to include their public keys in the paper; preferably as metadata and have them produce a signed message using their private key which allows them to claim the paper.

While the grandparent is understandably disappointed with the current implementation, relying on emails was always doomed from the start.

Given that the paper would have be changed regardless, including the full email address is a relatively easy solution. ORCID is probably easier than requiring public keys and a lot of journals already require them.

W3D Decentralized Identifiers are designed for this use case.

Decentralized identifier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_identifier

W3C TR did-core: "DID Decentralized Identifiers 1.0": https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/

W3C TR did-use-cases: "Use Cases and Requirements for Decentralized Identifiers" https://www.w3.org/TR/did-use-cases/

"Email addresses are not good 'permanent' identifiers for accounts" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38823817#38831952

I'm sure that would work, but most researchers already have an ORCID are required to provide it other places anyway.

In comparison to DIDs, ORCIDs aren't sk/pk pairs that can be used to cryptographically sign.

A person can generate (and optionally register) additional DIDs if they please.

A person can request additional ORCIDs if they please

Probably it would be better to merge the project with Arxiv and tie it to the accounts there.

The claiming was 'solved' and ORCID, which both basically do no checking at all. It's just a yes/no clicking for fuzzy matched author name lists. So I guess it is enough until there is a dispute. If you are important enough to be the target of trolls than you are in a league beyond most research platforms.

Perhaps by linking to their actual arxiv id?

There should be an equivalent of S/MIME for researchers if e-mail is not accessible.

Thanks for reaching out, I am one of the students working on this. We are adding google scholar support soon. If your paper isn't on Scholar or ORCID, you will need to submit a claim that our team reviews. There isn't really any other option, arXiv doesn't allow us to view the author's submission email automatically (although we are in the process of becoming an arXiv labs project soon).

Upload a new version of your paper on arxiv, this time with an email address that works.

Why should they need to? Their email address did work at the time of publication.

They don't have to. But then they cannot claim the paper.

It is a good idea in general to make sure that your papers contain up-to-date contact information. One way of doing this is to use an orc-id.

I’ve never understood why we need emails in papers.

Who sends emails to paper authors? How often do they respond? How fast do the email addresses go out of date? I lost access to my email address included in most my papers within 2 years of publication.

I see little to no value to have it included in the paper.

I do email paper authors and I do respond to requests and inquiries about my own papers. Even if you don't work at the same institution any longer, most universities let you redirect your email for many years after you left.

Also, I don't think we are yet at the point when human2human communication is not possible.

You don’t need emails in archival PDFs for human-to-human communication.

> Who sends emails to paper authors?

I do when the paper is not easily available or the publisher charges some outrageous fee (have seen $50 for a paper in the past).

Authors typically despise the publishers and are happy to share their work to anybody interested.

For sure. That is why I keep the preprint PDFs on my website (along with my current email address).

Who sends emails to paper authors?

I do, when I'd like to read a paper that's locked behind a paywall and not available on sci-hub. Authors of scientific papers are much like any other authors... they want to be read. The more enlightened among them understand that obscurity is a problem rather than a perk. They also tend to appreciate engagement in the form of follow-up questions (at least from people who actually read the paper.)

Obviously it's not a major concern on arxiv, but in a larger historical sense, this type of communication was a key original application of email.

If an author wants to be read then they will keep the preprint PDFs on their website (along with their current email address). An added benefit is that Google Scholar indexes and links directly to the PDFs instead of the publisher website.

So you've put a fake email address on your papers? As in, one that you can't receive from? Why?

> So you've put a fake email address on your papers?

I think you're failing to understand the basics of the problem, and even the whole problem domain.

Email addresses are not created/maintained for life. You can have an email address, them have your org change name and email provider switch, and not to mention that researchers leave research institutions and thus lose access to their accounts.

You have multiple scenarios where papers can be published with authors using email addresses which they lose access to.

> You have multiple scenarios where papers can be published with authors using email addresses which they lose access to.

Btw, why is it considered normal? I think it would be much better to mention an e-mail, to which you will have (more-or-less) permament access.

Security and affiliation purposes mostly.

> Btw, why is it considered normal?

What leads you to believe it isn't normal? I mean, do you have an eternal email address? Have you ever switched jobs?

Most papers are authored/co-authored by graduate students. Do you think all of them will hold onto their institutional address after they graduate? A big chunk of them will not even continue in the field.

Why would you expect any institution to support all email addresses of their ex-employees ad infinitum?

This would be a security nightmare for them. It is pretty normal for universities to have some sort of identity managmemt system that automatically provisions emails when you are employed there and deprovision them once you are gone.

Why not have a system where students and staff have actual email inboxes but alumni have their email forwarded?

Most universities use a portal of some sort for easy access to personal information and preferences anyway, so it shouldn't be too difficult to limit access for alumni to only allow them to change a few personal details like name / address / phone number and the like, plus email forwarding settings. I think the extra cost is negligible compared to what universities already spend on alumni like newsletters, conferences, dinners, etc.

An awful lot of free student access programs revolve around the uni email address being accredited. Foe example Jetbrains will give you a full version of their products if you register with a uni email, then require you to verify it yearly.

If you forward emails automatically then you'd lose this accreditation. I suppose the solution would be an accreditatiom domain that forwards to your uni address only, but that's extra work now.

If I run a university IT system I certainly don’t want someone who possibly attended a program thirty years ago walking around with an apparent affiliation with my institution. I find my institutions’ policies of (IIRC) one year forwarding + permanent alumni email pretty reasonable.

Additionally, making people who want to cold email work a little to acquire the current email address is actually a good thing, especially if they want to talk about something years old. I’ve generally had a lot more pleasant and engaging correspondence with people who worked out my email (say from a side project I develop pseudonymously) than ones who directly lifted my email from my professional profiles. So, expiring emails in papers generally isn’t a real problem anyway, and it’s basically never a hurdle if your target is still in academic circles. It only becomes a problem in this specific context of automated authentication (based on something not intended for that purpose).

I can't answer for everybody, but my (German) university is prohibited from doing so by law. We are state employees and as such our university needs a comtract with the people runnimg services that process our (or our students) data.

Obviously our university isn't gonna make a 10k€/month contract just because some prof wants their mail forwarded to gmail. Especially not if they are not working here anymore.

There’s nothing permanent in life.

Dumb example: you might have published a paper while working at a company, but years later the company went bankrupt and ceased to operate. Now somebody else is owning the domains and they will not make you the favour to give you an email address.

Notable example: Sun Microsystems. But there are many more, of course.

Or you just moved from one university to another. Or you published while on grad school and then moved somewhere else.

Here’s an example. I have a firstname.lastname@gmail.com address, which was intended to be permanent. Google turned on two-factor authentication, despite not having a second form of authentication available. Instead, they required the recovery address for 2FA. The recovery address was another Gmail address, which I haven’t used since 2010, and which also had 2FA turned on using its recovery address. That was an SBCGlobal address, a company which has long since been purchased by AT&T, and the email address is entirely defunct.

I place the blame here entirely on Google for misusing forms of identification. Two-factor authentication is having two locks on the same door, where recovery addresses are having two doors with separate locks. Using a recovery address for 2FA is absurd, and caused me to be locked out of my permanent email address.

“I place the blame on Google because I didn’t update my recovery address to one that worked”

First, recovery addresses are for recovery when access has been lost. They are an alternate method of entry when the primary method of entry has been lost. They are NOT an extra method of validation to be used for the primary method of entry.

When Google switched from offering 2FA to requiring 2FA, it would have been acceptable for them to require a second form of authentication to be added on the next log-in. It is not acceptable for Google to pretend that they have a second form of authentication when they do not.

Second, up until the moment it was needed, I had access to my recovery address. Google locked me out of my primary address and my recovery address simultaneously.

Did you notice that the issue was that O0P had failed to update the recovery address of their recovery address, and google removed access to both the main email and the recovery email at the same time?

That is just not always possible. An example that should be familiar to HN: I worked for a period at startup, and used my email at that startup (my only work email at the time, as that’s where I was working!). Then the startup ran out of money money and was sold. Hence the email no longer worked.

Should I have waited until the startup had more revenue? We were profitable at the time (we were B2B and the layoffs did us in)

> Email addresses are not created/maintained for life

Then don't pretend that it is an email address.

I mean, it's true that email addresses are not guaranteed to be assigned for life, but putting a fake email address on a paper is misleading.

> Then don't pretend that it is an email address.

I think you don't know what a email address is, and how they are used.

> (...) but putting a fake email address(...)

This nonsense of "fake email address" was only brought up as a baseless accusation. There is zero substance to it, and it's been used as a red herring in this discussion.

Focus on the problem: do you expect any and all email addresses you publish somewhere years ago to continue to work?

> [...] you won’t let me claim some of my preprints, because there’s no match with the email address. Which there can’t be, as we’re only listing a generic first.last@org addresses in the papers.

I understood it this way: org is not handing out first.last@org to the employee, but using an email format in order to clarify that "first last" is working at org and collaborated on the paper not in private, but as an employee.

He might have last.f@org gotten assigned as a valid email address from the org, but that one is not being used on the paper, while first.last@org is invalid.

> I think you don't know what a email address is, and how they are used.

You should know that this kind of comment should not be made on HN, see the guidelines [0] ("Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.").

> do you expect any and all email addresses you publish somewhere years ago to continue to work?

No. But that is irrelevant to this conversation.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Let's say that John Smith at XYZ Corp has authored a paper. The company obviously wants recognition and so they use their corporate email address "jsmith@xyz.com".

John has since moved on and is earning more at ABC Corp instead. XYZ Corp has duly reclaimed John's old email address, and John cannot receive emails at said address any longer.

This is the situation the OP is in. It was never a "fake email address". They did not literally type "first.last@org", that was an example suitable for using in their comment.

[edit: I'm actually wrong with that last statement, as it turns out. While it wasn't a fake email address, the situation is slightly more nuanced in that OP actually did say "{first}.{last}@hhi.fraunhofer.de" in the paper, as there were multiple authors who all had the same email address format - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41479618. I still think this is a valid method, though, and it's certainly not fake. Besides, the problem I outlined sounds like it probably remains an issue even if it's not the exact problem OP is experiencing.]

Ok, so they used a template on the paper, namely "{first}.{last}@hhi.fraunhofer.de", while the email addresses, if the names are applied to the template, do in fact yield valid email addresses.

It sounded as if they were using "john.doe@hhi.fraunhofer.de" while in reality it was an invalid email address ("because there’s no match with the email address"), that he would have tried to claim co-authorship via his "real" address, which might be something like "j.doe2@hhi.fraunhofer.de" (but luckily is not).

It's all clear now. Thank you for your explanation.

This is what I was asking about and I thank you and GP for clarifying the situation. There also send to be an unnecessary flamewar about the impermanence of email addresses generally, that's an unfortunate accident.

I infer that you interpreted this question as an attack, or at least some sort of criticism. None was meant, I really just wanted to know if the email adress as written in the document was deliberately invalid or not.

You were declaring the address to be "fake". Presumed facts not in evidence.

I wasn't declaring anything! It was a question, which is why it ended with a question mark. It's a totally standard construction in English, and would probably include a rising tone if spoken.

I cannot understand how what's written there could have been confidently construed as a statement.

because you used the word fake in an accusatory tone. that seems to not be what you intended, but that seems more on you to word it better than to expect all readers to interpret your words differently.

Conflating email addresses with identity in the digital age is a global techical debt.

Preprints are not required to be fully typeset and publishable. In some cases, literally "first.last@org" is used as a placeholder for email addresses (to be replaced in typesetting).

This is more like a mismatch between "fully edited open-acess papers" and "trying to use arxiv preprints as an approximation of the former".

For the record, at least in my field Arxiv is where the action happens and journals are an afterthought. I don't put placeholders for contact details in my preprints because 1) the adresses likely won't change between drafts and 2) lots of readers are going to be reading that version so I want them to have access to the real info.

Of course most of that is moot for professional scientists because you likely know (or at least be able to find out about) the authors already. For example some papers have old non-working email addresses for the authors who have since moved institution. It's not a problem, since I'll just look them up by name if necessary and usetheir current email.

No, they used the email from the institute they worked at when the produced the paper.

They're no longer at that institute, and that email no longer exists (while some institutions give some leeway, I know of at least one major university which removes them the day the contract ends).

This is a common problem if you're providing services to academics and you've tied yourself to using emails as identifiers.

Does not have to be fake or anything. You move from one institution to the other and cannot maintain it forever anyway.

I know you don't have a lifetime access to institutional email adress, but using a fake address is so counterproductive. You're only going to claim the paper once, and yuh ou should do it while you have access to your email. Then you update your account eith a new address.

Let's say that John Smith at XYZ Corp has authored a paper. The company obviously wants recognition and so they use their corporate email address "jsmith@xyz.com".

John has since moved on and is earning more at ABC Corp instead. XYZ Corp has duly reclaimed John's old email address, and John cannot receive emails at said address any longer.

This is the situation the OP is in. It was never a "fake email address". They did not literally type "first.last@org", that was an example suitable for using in their comment.

OP here, what I'm actually using is "{first}.{last}@hhi.fraunhofer.de" (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.13299). I see how my earlier comment was confusing.

In our case it's for saving space in the paper, and also for reducing spam. This small change may now seem silly in the age of LLMs, but the papers that have full email addresses in them get a considerable amount of fake conference and journal participation emails, which is annoying.

Oh, I see - the situation's more nuanced than I thought, then. My apologies.

I still think this is valid (and certainly not the fake email address that people are calling it), but yeah, it's not what I thought it was.

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