Background:
I came up with a new idea in the field of Computational Intelligence, and wrote a paper which I uploaded on TechRxiv. When submitting it to a conference, I realized that the title was too simple, and in the submitted paper (Springer Nature template), I improved the title and abstract and made a few changes to the paper in terms of grammar and clarity of the text.
What happened:
The conference initially rejected the paper saying "Unfortunately, it is not recommended for review because of its high similarity with existing content".
I clarified, saying that their plagiarism checker may have matched it with what I uploaded on TechRxiv.
The conference organizers responded saying: "Yes, it is rejected due to a repository paper. Please note that the titles of both papers are different. Repository may be considered if both papers are identical".
My understanding of a pre-print repository is that it is a place where authors can publish a rough version of their paper to get a timestamp of when they came up with an idea and also to be able to share the paper with other academics to solicit their opinion. There's no need for a pre-print version to match the version submitted to a journal or conference. A former teacher was once told that she shouldn't publish a paper to an ArXiv, so I know there are people in academia who aren't familiar with the purpose of a pre-print repository.
I know that few journals won't accept a paper if it is already on a pre-print repository. But I have already published papers with Springer, when my papers were already on TechRxiv, and the titles didn't match exactly. So I'd like to know if it would be appropriate to inform the conference organizers that there's nothing wrong with accepting the paper even if the title is different, or perhaps asking after uploading the updated paper to TechRxiv?
Potential problem: The old version of the paper is uploaded to EngRxiv too, and I've had login problems and the tech team is unresponsive. So I won't be able to update the paper there.
