Why does MPRA refuse to remove submissions from the archive?
There are several reasons for adopting this policy.
- The first reason is practical: Removal of individual items involves manual work. At the beginning we allowed removal requests but it turned out that there were so many requests that we could not handle them with our resources. As there are other important reasons for disallowing withdrawals, we decided for such a policy.
- An important reason is the integrity of the archive and the RePEc services (NEP, CitEc). If a paper is taken from the archive, all links and references will become dead. This means that citations cease to be reliable.
- Another reason is related to documentation of priority of results. A crazy case would be that a paper is plagiarized and then removed. Now the plagiary will appear as the original source, and a later version of the original paper will appear as plagiary.
- A third reason is that contributions that end up in toll-gated journals are not accessible for many. As the MPRA version remains openly accessible, this mitigates the problem.
