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E-print submission in a nutshell

E-prints submissions should be sent to xxx at Los Alamos, with either the web upload system (the recommended method) or by e-mail or ftp. Before submitting anything, you should review what you want to send. In addition to the advice below about e-print preparation, you should review any copyright agreements you have made and you should review the xxx policies on versions and withdrawal. Also keep in mind that the xxx help pages offer authoritative instructions (unlike this page) and that official human help is available at www-admin@xxx.lanl.gov.

Step-by-step web upload

Register as an xxx user (you only need to do this once). Send a message to math@xxx.lanl.gov with subject register (and with any or no message body):
```
To: math@xxx.lanl.gov
Subject: register

(anything)
```
Go to the xxx registration page to complete registration.
Arrange and count your submission files and prepare an abstract following the advice below. If you have many submission files, you may wish to bundle them together into a tar file; the command for this under Unix is:
```
tar -cf paper.tar paper.tex paper.bbl fig1.eps fig2.eps
```
Go to the xxx submit (which requires your registered username and password) to submit a new e-print via the Web. You should paste in the title and abstract and other information and state how many files you are uploading. You can at this point preview the abstract as it will appear in on the web. Note: Any indented line in your input abstract causes the displayed version to start on a new line.
The server will ask you to upload files one by one. When you have uploaded the last file, the server will, without further warning, compile the e-print and either accept or reject it. You will get a compilation report and a password both by e-mail and on a web page. You have most of the day to check the e-print at xxx for mistakes; you can access your e-print with its stamp as the username and with the supplied password. You can completely expunge or replace an unsatisfactory submission until xxx announces new e-prints at 10:00PM US Mountain Time.

Preparation: Title, author, abstract

The ideal submission abstract follows this fictitious example, which has been adapted from a displayed abstract at the Front to match field names and contents at xxx:

Title: A way to enumerate 3-manifolds
Authors: Xiang-Dong Lee (Nowhere State University), John Q. Smith
Subj-class: GT; CO
MSC-class: 57M (primary), 05 (secondary)
Comments: 10 pages. See also http://www.math.nowhere.edu/~lee/papers/ .
Report-no: NSU-97 #1234
Journal-Ref: J. Math. 1 (1997), 1-10
Abstract: We present a way to enumerate 3-manifolds using ideas from geometric topology and combinatorics. Our main tool is the Gromov-Milnor-Thurston-Witten functor Phi:X_0 -> Y_0.

This example lists all possible fields. Of these, only Title, Authors, Abstract, and Subj-class are mandatory. The other fields are optional.

The submission has no ALL CAPS or $\full$-$\blown$ $\TeX$ (although it does have simplified TeX-like syntax). "The title," has no extraneous punctuation. The abstract does not begin with the word "Abstract" since it would be redundant. The authors are listed as First M. Last, Given M. Family with institutions (not e-mail) in parentheses. The authors have avoided undue abbreviation of their names to avoid name collisions and they use the same names consistently in all submissions (for better searching). Only some of these basic steps are strict rules, but it makes sense to follow all of them regardless.

Subj-class has a list of categories taken from the categories used by xxx and the Front. The first category listed is the primary one, used in the label of the eprint (in this case math.UA). The other, optional classification (MSC-class) is taken from the Math Subject Classification used by Math Reviews and Zentralblatt für Mathematik. Report-no (report number) is a reference to a local or institutional preprint series. The comment field has an optional clause of the form "NNN pages", which is also useful for searching. Both the comments field and the abstract can have URL's, but it is important for the URL not to touch punctation so that it can be properly identified and hyperlinked by the archive servers.

Finally, Journal-ref (journal reference) is a complete reference to a traditional paper journal or its on-line equivalent. Annotations that a paper has been submitted or will appear should go in the comments field and not here. The best syntax follows the standard AMS bibliography style and the example above:

Abbrev. J. VOL (YEAR), PAGE-PAGE

Although this field is optional, the journal publisher may consider it important.

Preparation: The text of the paper

The text of the e-print must be TeX source if the e-print is written in TeX. xxx has a robust TeX compilation system supported by a large library of macros; it will accept almost any reasonable TeX document. If the document is not in TeX, it can be plain ASCII, HTML with GIF equations, or Postscript; other software packages such as Microsoft Word can usually produce output in the last two formats. DVI and Postscript produced from TeX will not be accepted. (The xxx TeX FAQ explains why if you are curious.)

Postscript figures can be incorporated with standard TeX macros. Alternatively, figures and images in Postscript, GIF, or JPEG formats can be included separately (unincorporated); files of this type which used during TeX compilation will be listed in a menu by xxx. Included Postscript should not have huge baggage in tow.

If the e-print involves BibTeX, the submission should include the .bbl file but not any .bib files.

Revisions, annotations, and withdrawals

After you submit a paper, you will be sent a password to control it. You can then go to the following three web pages to change the uploaded version of the paper:

xxx replacement: for full replacements and withdrawals
xxx cross-reference: to cross-reference other archives or add categories
xxx journal reference: to cite a version of the paper in a traditional journal

The server will ask you for a username and password before giving you access to these pages. You should use the stamp on the paper (e.g. math.CO/9712001) as the username and the given password as the password.

To withdraw a paper outright, you should replace it with a withdrawal notice, a brief document in TeX or ASCII explaining why the e-print should not be read.

Modifications on the same day that the paper has been submitted (i.e., before e-mail announcements at 10:00PM US Mountain Time) fully replace the original submission or any other modifications on the same day. After that, the newest version or withdrawal notice will be the default, but any older version will still be available from the abstract page. (See the xxx versions page for more information.)

Writing e-prints in TeX

TeX is the recommended submission format for xxx e-prints. It is also wise to use an up-to-date TeX macro system such as LaTeX2e (LaTeX version 2-epsilon). To get started with LaTeX2e, you can read

L. Lamport. Latex: A Document Preparation System. Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, second edition, 1994.

and you can experiment with the example document provided here.

The two immediate conveniences of LaTeX (over other forms of TeX) for submissions to xxx are BibTeX, LaTeX's bibliography system, and standardized graphics macros. BibTeX entries provided by the Front require hyperlinked BibTeX style files (.bst files). You can put these style files in the same directory as your document when you compile it. Better yet, you can ask your system manager to install them.

What do you think of the Front? comments@front.math.ucdavis.edu would like your opinion.