I don't think Google scholar has this fully solved either, I've seen many misattributed papers there.
While the grandparent is understandably disappointed with the current implementation, relying on emails was always doomed from the start.
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
A person can generate (and optionally register) additional DIDs if they please.
A person can request additional ORCIDs if they please
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.]
It sounded as if they were using "[email protected]" 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 "[email protected]" (but luckily is not).
It's all clear now. Thank you for your explanation.
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?
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.
I cannot understand how what's written there could have been confidently construed as a statement.
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.
This is more like a mismatch between "fully edited open-acess papers" and "trying to use arxiv preprints as an approximation of the former".
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.
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.
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.
Also, I don't think we are yet at the point when human2human communication is not possible.
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.
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.
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.]
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.
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.
I think it’ll be hard growing a discussion platform, if there’s barriers of entry like that to even populate your profile.