[j-pb]

Journal versions are simply not immutable because they are referenced by name, not by content. I regularly see a good percentage of dead or wrong DOI, and I've hunted my fair share of papers that were supposedly released in a journal, but that only ever existed in preprint.

Arxiv already accepts latex and compiles it for you, we should expect the same from journals and ask them to publish the hash of the document they received.

[davrosthedalek]

Journal versions are reference by journal name, volume, year, page number, indexing a hard copy version you can find in a library. Seems pretty immutable to me.

The journals I published in all accepted latex. But they convert it to use their layouting software. The last correction steps are typically done only in this version, and the author has to backport them into their tex code. Why should the journal have any interest in making the arxiv version more attractive?

[j-pb]

Even if we ignore reprints, editorial series that rearrange papers (and make a paper citable more than one way), and proceedings (which often don't properly distinguish between papers, but use author + proceeding).

Science simply doesn't operate on journal published papers most of the time. The paper mills run so hot that you regularly cite preprints, that get exchanged between authors directly. It happens regularly that the proof is supposedly in the "full paper" only that the "full paper" was never published.