[IPOL discuss] publishing the LaTeX source of IPOL articles?

[Nicolas Limare]

Pascal Getreuer wrote:
> I see the potential benefits, but for past articles, I do suggest
> that IPOL asks for the author's consent before publishing their
> LaTeX sources.

Of course. IPOL doesn't corrently have the right to distribute these
LaTeX sources, whose copyright and exclusive distribution rights
belong to the authors.

>> Moreover, some people in a conference recently attended by Carlo
>> say they want to be able to regenerate article files in other
>> formats than the PDF provided by the publisher.
>
> That would be really great, and for me a motivating reason to
> publish LaTeX sources.  What formats do they have in mind?

Carlo, can you tell us more about it? And also maybe about the
comments made by the audience?

Jean-Michel Morel wrote:
> I may confess that I am scared by this idea, because I see plagerism
> booming in the submissions to journals. Authors, particularly in
> Asia, don't copy just  the text; they copy figures, tables,
> experiments, and republish again with different author names in
> other journals.

Daniel Kondermann wrote:
> I think the basic idea is very nice, but plagiarism will be
> difficult to control.

Doesn't plagiarism already exist now, even with few LaTeX sources
available? It seems that crook authors don't need our sources to steal
papers and send them to obscure conferences and journals.

For a better example, for years and decades, the arXiv (830000 papers)
has asked (burt not required) authors to publish their LaTeX
source. And their FAQ exactly answers the objections raised here:

    -> http://fr.arxiv.org/help/faq/whytex

    Won't TeX source make it easy to plagiarize?

    There is no file format or other technological device that can
    protect you from this. At the very least, unscrupulous re-typers
    would always remain a threat. Postscript does not provide a
    barrier in any event: it is quite simple for someone with a little
    knowledge to extract any text from a Postscript file. Moreover a
    plagiarist who cuts-and-pastes directly from your TeX source is
    all the more easily detected, since the source is easily
    identified. We archive all versions of papers so that we can
    assist in any priority or plagiarism disputes.

    I worked hard to make my figures and I don't want people to steal
    them. Shouldn't I hide them by embedding them in my PostScript?

    As with the above question, it is quite easy for someone with a
    little knowledge to extract anything they like from your
    Postscript file. Furthermore, unauthorized or un-attributed use of
    figures counts as plagiarism, just as above, so the rest of the
    above discussion applies here as well.

    What if my TeX source has potentially embarrassing self-comments
    in it?

    Well... you should probably take them out. It is easy to strip
    these out in advance of submitting. Here is a Perl filter to do
    it. Please, please do not hurt yourself with this script; save
    your file and do not write over the backup copy... just in case.

        #!/usr/local/bin/perl
        while(<STDIN>){ s/^\%.*$/\%/; s/([^\\])\%.*$/\1\%/g; print; }
        exit(0);

    or use the one line command

        perl -pe 's/(^|[^\\])%.*/\1%/' < old.tex > new.tex



-- 
Nicolas LIMARE - CMLA - ENS Cachan         http://limare.perso.math.cnrs.fr/
IPOL journal                                             http://www.ipol.im/
-> image processing, reproducible research, open science
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