E-mail address to use in publications

Question

It is customary to use one's academic e-mail address as contact address in publications; I have seen once or twice an @gmail.com address being used instead, but it simply looked unprofessional.

However, I already experienced personally twice that system administrators love to deactivate e-mail addresses when people leave the institution. In a time when serving 1 GB of data costs one cent, apparently it is too demanding to set up forwarding for a few old users.

This leads to "e-mail rot" in many published papers, also for addresses that are explicitly designated as contact addresses. If one happens to have a popular name, it might become difficult to identify them using a search engine after the e-mail address becomes invalid.

What is your proposed solution to this problem? Should we (well, the ones of us that have tenure and power) put pressure on system administrator to change this practice? Should we use in our publications a different, more stable e-mail address than the academic one? Should we maybe get rid of the e-mail and contact address in papers overall? Should we insist that the journal publishers set up an alternative contact system (good luck with that)?

Related question: Changing mailing and e-mail addresses as corresponding author--which to include?

Answer 1

Since Piotr's answer and the discussion following it states the most important points (while an academic email address may become invalid, a private one provides no means to verify the author's actual affiliation, or even suggest the author doesn't identify with it), here's my suggestion:

1. Create a PGP key⁺ for your private email address
   • optionally add your academic email address as another identity
2. Have your key signed, e.g. by
   • colleagues
   • your institution's sysadmin
   • a key exclusively for your academic email adress
3. Publish the key, e.g. at http://pgp.mit.edu/
4. Ask the publisher to include your public key⁺ or at least the footprint in the publication
   • The online version should even link to the key entry to make verification easier

Now everyone can easily check your affiliation while you've made sure you can be contacted in the future - you can even add alternative email addresses to you key later on (the upload can be updated), and everyone will be able to deduce that should your original address not be reachable any more, you might be reachable via one of the other addresses associated with your public key.

As an additional benefit, now both you and your co-authors can sign the publication itself, adding another level of trust that this is truly authored (or sometimes rather endorsed, if you're so honest ;) by each of you. And since you now have PGP keys anyway, you can also sign and/or encrypt your emails, making electronic communication both more trustworthy and less prone to leaks. Also, it keeps the NSA out for a while.

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⁺ In case you're not familiar with PGP:

You create a pair of keys consisting of a secret key (which you and only you shall ever possess) and a public key (which you are supposed to make as public as possible/required). The secret key can be used to put a signature on anything digital, like messages, files, protocols, papers or other people's public key, and anyone can use the matching public key to verify that this signature stems from that secret key, and thus (hopefully) from you. Reversely, anyone can encrypt data for you with your public key that only you can decrypt again with your secret key (messages can be encrypted for multiple recipients as well if required). Since everyone can sign anyone's key, you obtain the Web of trust, a network of keys that allows you to estimate how reliable the association of a key to an actual person is without having to exchange public keys in person. (The downside is, your email address is public and social engineering is possible, but we're responsible adults, right?)

A great open source implementation of the Open PGP standard is the GNU Privacy Guard

Answer 2

Personally, I think that (in academia) sticking to official e-mail addresses is an atavism.

Currently, one's personal e-mail (say, [email protected]) is better because:

• usually more efficient/stable/etc,
• lasts for longer than 1-4 years.

While names like mad_theoretican_666@... may sound ridiculous for professional communications (but it's rather a matter of taste than anything else), I don't see anything wrong with e-mails like name.surname@ or n.surname@.

However, I heard quite a few times that non-institutional e-mails sounds less serious.

But honestly, if someone builds his/her value depending on how his/her e-mail sounds (and doing it against very practical reasons), it is the thing that is ridiculous.

Answer 3

The American Mathematical Society had a email forwarding service for its members, which gives them a stable @member.ams.org address that they can update as they move. However, this email forwarding service is no longer available. Still, something like this could be a good solution.

Answer 4

When I see a gmail address on a paper I think "this is an IT-savvy author who realises their current institutional email address will probably be gone in a few years and wants people to be able to contact them after that." It doesn't look at all unprofessional to me.

But if you're concerned about the appearance of such an address, one solution would be to register your own domain name and have an email address like [email protected], which forwards to (for example) a gmail account. You can also put your own academic web site at this domain, meaning you can take that with you when you change institutions as well.

_{(Edit from years later: if you do this, make sure that you will be able to keep the domain name registered decades hence. I didn't receive emails from the registration company I used - ironically, because my email address changed - and consequently the domain now points to a spam site, and I can't get it back. So I'm kind of glad I stuck with gmail for my publications.)}

Answer 5

I make a point of offering all of my papers for download from my website. So if readers discover me via a paper I've written, it should be easy for them to find my website (just google my name and the title of the paper). On my website I list my current email address.

Answer 6

Should we (well, the ones of us that have tenure and power) put pressure on system administrator to change this practice?

Implementing a direct forward (i.e., your mailbox no longer exists, so no disk space problem) is not really hard, and I have currently two previous email addresses forwarded. The volume of emails decreases

Should we use in our publications a different, more stable e-mail address than the academic one?

What makes you think that a gmail address is more stable than an academic one? What if gmail decides to switch to a different business model where you would have to pay for that address, would you necessarily keep it? Would you say that your yahoo email is stable? Maybe it was 3 years ago, but now, I wouldn't be so sure. Academic institutions tend to last longer.

In addition, as you said, personal addresses look unprofessional, because they cannot be trusted. It won't cause your paper to be rejected, but that's not going to be a plus side. And it won't change the fact that readers of your papers can contact you or not.

Should we maybe get rid of the e-mail and contact address in papers overall? Should we insist that the journal publishers set up an alternative contact system (good luck with that)?

As other people mentioned, the important point for contact is actually that people can find you. An email is a unique ID, you can put it on your current page so as to be indexed by search engines.

Answer 7

Should we use a stable email address?

I agree that seeing @gmail.com, @hotmail.com, @yahoo.com in email addresses for academic papers is somewhat jarring. That it should be the case probably says more about our assumptions about the author than it should (why doesn't he/she have a proper email address?). The benefits of having a stable email account - for those of us still moving frequently from post to post - is undeniable, but we choose not to use it for these reasons. Will that attitude change? Not impossible, but don't count on it.

Should we put pressure on sysadmins to maintain forwards on our old emails?

I'm not a sysadmin but I doubt whether any sysadmin would look favourably on maintaining indefinitely forwards in this way. After two or three hops, your email chain starts getting long and vulnerable.

Should we get rid of addresses altogether?

Probably not. We need some way of being contactable.

Should we insist that the journal publishers set up an alternative contact system

I like this idea but appreciate that getting the publishers to do this would be difficult.

What if there was a third party site which stored up-to-date contact data and was linked to by the journals? A freely accessible, central repository of author contact data. The authors would be responsible for maintaining their contact information.

Users of the repository would themselves have to log in to prevent massive downloading of users' data by spammers.

Answer 8

Eventually, if ORCID (discussed also in this answer) takes momentum (and it seems it will, since it is backed by the most important publishers), it could solve this problem: the paper contains the ORCID number of the author, and points to an online profile which the researcher themselves can update.

Answer 9

In the age of search engines and relatively high mobility on the side of researchers, personally I see no reason to include an e-mail address on research papers. Whenever possible (i.e., the published/editor does not explicitly ask for it), I do not include it at all and if I must, I use the currently valid one. The reason is exactly that it becomes invalid quite quickly. The e-mail address is not useful even as a means for author identity disambiguation. For lucky guys bearing a name like "John Smith" in various languages (I am such a case as well), it's relatively common to encounter a guy with the same name, or initials working at the same university, or sharing part of academic history.

A complementary issue to the original question posed is this:

How many times in the last ten years did you used an e-mail address stated in the paper as a means to contact the author(s) of the paper?

I did so exactly zero times and know of nobody who did so more than that (and yes, I asked several colleagues about this in the course of the last few years).

Answer 10

While I like Tobias' approach I agree that it is overkill. However, I wonder whether it would just be a rather simple solution to give two email adresses of the corresponding author: the institutional and the stable personal one.

On the other hand, while I do sometimes contact authors using the contact email address, I consider this a convenience rather than a necessity.

• It is usually quite easy to track down the author even if he moved on. People at the old institute usually know where he went.

• If the author has been moving on so often that the old institute doesn't know any longer where to find him,

  • usually that means that he (or the institute) moved to a different field,
  • and this happens mostly for papers that were published quite a while ago (but if he has continued working in that field, you usually find newer work with newer contact address)
  • consequently, there's a high probability that he anyways doesn't remember the details I want to ask...

Answer 11

We should just use the email of our current academic institution, and academic institutions should provide user-controlled forwarding of some type (so people don't need to ask a sys admin if their forwarding address changes). Simple, effective.

Should we (well, the ones of us that have tenure and power) put pressure on system administrator to change this practice?"

Yes. Unqualifiedly. In my opinion, any institution that fails to do that does a massive disservice to its students and non-tenured researchers (i.e., anyone who might leave during their career). Email forwarding is not hard, nor is it costly. If someone tells me their institution doesn't forward, I would suspect they have a mediocre administrative infrastructure for research. Research institutions are built on the successes of their professors and professor's successes are built (in part) on the success of their students and research staff. If you could improve your school's standing in the research community by one peg by adding email forwarding, wouldn't it look pretty stupid not to do it?

Disconnecting those researchers' emails entirely is a small but non-trivial obstacle that could impact their research careers, which trickles back to the institution (particularly with PhD recipients). They might miss out on invitations to collaborate, book chapters, and even a heads-up on job opportunities. To those who say "Well, I always Google anyway," you probably aren't emailing a couple dozen people to contribute to a book (or, for an encyclopedia, think 100+ contributors). If you did and a couple emails bounced, how much time will you spend trying to hunt down the new emails?

I've been affiliated with an institution that did provide email forwarding, by a mechanism that I thought was pretty flexible. At the end of your time there, they closed down your email account after a couple months (the storage, that is). You could request that your emails be forwarded to an alumni address. This alumni address was controlled by you, in terms of where it forwarded.

So then, you would do the following:

1. Create an alumni address
2. Set up your original email at the institution to forward to the alumni account
3. Set up the alumni address to forward to a stable account (e.g., Gmail)
4. Emails to either your original or alumni emails would forward to the permanent email

So long as your permanent email doesn't change, you only need to do this process once per institution. Even if you did change your permanent email, it would take only a small amount of time to re-route your forwarding (one re-route per past institution).