[Taxacom] Nomenclatural availability of preliminary electronic versions of taxonomic papers

[Laurent Raty]

On 10/16/2015 03:47 PM, Scott Thomson wrote:
> In response to Laurent. I agree there seems to be no real and absolute
> final version if you count the adding of #tags as a part of the document.

Well, I think that, ideally, it should (have) be(en) possible for the 
user to assess the integrity of a work distributed electronically. If a 
publication had been defined as a given distributed file, with a fixed 
sequence of bytes, this would (have) be(en) fully straightforward--all 
it requires is that a checksum value be released together with the 
original work. This is fairly standard practice for other types of files 
distributed through the Internet.
Assessing the integrity of a "content and layout", if the file is 
allowed to change, is at best a nightmare.

OTOH, I'm not sure there's a real, deep, qualitative difference between 
allowing file alteration as a result of a change in a download date and 
ip address added to the footer, and allowing file alteration as a result 
of a change in a page number added to the header.
Thus if you *must* allow the file to change, is it really worth the 
effort to require that the page numbers be fixed...?

L -