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If different versions of a paper have different DOI then the DOI is broken and should be replaced by something better.

I consider it a heresy that some sites (fuck ResearchGate, Academia.edu) consider it fine to alter the PDFs. Document integrity should be the holy grail. Files should be final and never get touched. If they are, they are different.

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Wait, aren't those two statements opposed to each other?

Different versions of a paper should have different DOIs. A DOI is fundamentally quite abstract, and there is no reason that an object-appropriate versioning scheme can't be laid on top. Figshare, for example, uses a versioning system where there is a single DOI referring to the overall artefact (e.g. 10.6084/m9.figshare.2066037) and a versioned-by-suffix DOI referring to a specific version (e.g. 10.6084/m9.figshare.2066037.v16). That works really well IMO.

ArXiv itself does this. See the 'cite as' section of this one: https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.08475, which has the note

arXiv:1707.08475 [stat.ML] (or arXiv:1707.08475v1 [stat.ML] for this version)

Oops, yes of course. That's what I meant. Typo. :)

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