[dinosaur] Years of publication, was Re: Sue the T-rex story and controversy over access to fossils (free pdf)

["David Marjanovic" <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

Pet peeve alert:

> Gesendet:ÂMittwoch, 08. Januar 2020 um 12:46 Uhr
> Von:Â"Thomas Richard Holtz" <tholtz@umd.edu>
>
> Formal date for most journals is regarded as the publishing of the PRINTED 
> volume. Hence 2020.

"Formal" means what?

If you follow the link to the article, it says "Published: 31 December 2019", 
and then under the author's name it says "History and Philosophy of the Life 
Sciences volume 42, Article number: 2 (2019)".

Several big publishers indicate the date of online publication by "Published:" 
or "Version of record online:".

The International Code of Zoological Nomenclature recognizes the date of online 
publication as the date of publication if the paper has been registered in 
ZooBank and contains evidence of that. Whether the paper is afterwards printed 
(two calendar years later as in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology...) is 
irrelevant in that case.

Some journals publish accepted manuscripts online. Those differ from the final 
published version in layout, including pagination, and at least potentially in 
content, because they haven't been proofread. These clearly should not count 
for the purpose of establishing the date of publication.

But most journals that appear online and in print publish a version online that 
differs from the later print version only in lacking permanent page and usually 
volume & issue numbers; the content is immutable, including which letters 
appear on which page. So why should we PRETEND that a publisher can 
RETROACTIVELY change the date of publication of a paper by printing it?

In reality, how you have to cite a paper in your manuscript depends not on the 
journal the paper appeared in, or on its publisher; it depends on the always 
secret house style of the journal you're submitting your manuscript to. PeerJ, 
for example, changed all publication dates to print dates in the proofs of my 
huge paper. I tried to argue with them, they never answered, and the print 
dates are now published.

It's not going to matter in the present case where a paper was published on the 
last day of the year and printed very early the next year. But in principle, to 
cite a date that lies a year or two after the year of publication is actively 
misleading about the contents: it makes papers appear more up-to-date than they 
are.

Also, I've seen "2017" papers that were responses to "2018" papers. Of course 
they were published later than the papers they responded to; they were just 
printed faster.