I would like to make it clear that I do not have an adversarial
relationship with any authors at LENR-CANR.org. I never upload papers
without permission, except when the author is dead (and when I knew him and
I am sure he would not mind). In a few instances, when authors have decided
they did not want the papers uploaded after all, I removed them promptly.
These have been theorists who decided their theories were wrong. I have
edited many papers, but it has always been with the friendly consent and
cooperation of the authors. I would not think of changing a paper if the
author did not want me to.
Steven Vincent Johnson wrote:
It also is reasonable to assume that papers and reports submitted in PDF
format are by their very definition BEYOND the point of needing additional
post-editing.
Perhaps that is true of some authors, but most just write the paper, press
a button and zap out a PDF file. Usually it is okay, but I have read and
edited hundreds of papers, and many were chaotic. The authors made mistakes
either in the original word processor file, or in the Acrobat conversion
parameters. Some were so messed up they crashed the Acrobat reader with a
fatal error. Some have pages that appear when you scroll down, and then
vanish when you scroll up, or figures the cover up the text, or mirror
image photographs. I often see Japanese or Chinese characters left over in
the text encoded wrong so they come out like smiley-faces or dots. Several
PDF files have been 10 to 100 times larger than they need to be, for no
apparent reason.
While I can appreciate the fact that Dr. Swartz would like to maintain total
control over the content of his work . . .
Any author who wishes to maintain total control over a paper submitted to
LENR-CANR is welcome to do so. That's less work for me. I would not think
of editing one word without the author's consent and cooperation. On the
other hand, if a paper were full of spelling errors and grammatical
mistakes, and the author did not wish to correct it, I would probably not
upload it. This has never happened, but anyway, I would not want the public
to think that CF researchers are illiterate or they do not know the
difference between "their" and "there."
In conclusion it would seem to me that Dr. Swartz does not appear to trust
Jed (or Ed Storms?) to carry out the intent of his word and edit and/or
critique his work.
First, we never edit anything unless the author wants us to. Second,
although I have several of Swartz's papers, he has emphatically refused to
give me permission to upload any them. Obviously I am not going to bother
proofreading or editing them!
- Jed
