Mitchell Swartz wrote:
1. The issue is not about censorship of papers, but it is about the
systematic censorship of ICCF-10 titles by Storms and Rothwell,
while purporting they are the "official" ICCF-10 site.
It is just the opposite. Peter Hagelstein asked us to make it clear that
LENR-CANR is the unofficial site. He asked us to add the following text to
the heading of every ICCF10 paper:
"This paper was presented at the 10th International Conference on Cold
Fusion. It may be different from the version published by World Scientific,
Inc (2003) in the official Proceedings of the conference."
I thought that was a good idea, and I was happy to do it.
(A few of the papers came to me in Acrobat format only and I had difficult
shoehorning this text into them. That sort of thing is easier to do with
the newest version of "PDF Converter.")
The "systematic censorship of titles" that Swartz refers to is pure
moonshine. I cannot tell whether he is lying or paranoid, but I have never
censored a single title, and it is absurd to think that I would. The
database include anti-cold fusion propaganda and books, and other stuff
that I abhor and would never upload. On rare occasions I have refused to
upload papers for various reasons, mainly because they are off-topic or
incomprehensible, but there is no reason why I would leave out a title. I
did remove some of Swartz's titles because a year after the conference I
had heard nothing from him or from Peter Hagelstein, so I assumed these
papers were never written. There is no point in listing papers that do not
exist. Actually, I suspect there are few "phantom" papers in the database,
and if I find them I will delete them.
Of course it is difficult to confirm that a paper was never published. If
the author tells me it was published, I take him at his word. It is no big
deal to have a few phantom items in a list of 3,273 papers. There are
probably some duplicates as well. The database was created by Dieter Britz
and Ed Storms, and in general they did a fine job, but mistakes inevitably
creep into the database as large as this. (It includes the titles, authors,
co-authors, journal name and so on, and also abstracts and commentary.) I
winnowed out several mistakes when I first converted the database to the
online version. I used Pascal programs to make comparisons and look for
problems that would have been tedious to fix manually.
- Jed
