OrionWorks wrote:
As the librarian for lenr-canr.org I can appreciate your desire that the website's content maintains a professional appearance and credibility, that all papers are presented in a clear precise and readable format.
Mind you, we are talking about the physical Acrobat format here. I never change the content unless the author wants me to, mainly when the author speaks English as a second language.
In a few cases, American or European authors have used strange Acrobat conversion settings and the papers were unreadable, so I converted them again. I use ScanSoft PDF Converter 4 Professional for all languages, which works way better than rival products:
http://www.nuance.com/pdfconverter/
I can understand Dr. Storms as well as your desire that all papers conform whenever possible to NIST standards . . .
That's only me. I do not enforce these standards, but if the author asks for help editing, I use them.
whatever this official "NIST" term really stands for . . .
National Institute of Standards and Technology. (http://www.nist.gov/) But it is actually a cover operation for Men in Black supported by extraterrestrials. I know this because my dad used to work there and I visited the place when I was a kid. It is located in Gaithersburg, Maryland, right next door to the plasma fusion lobbying organization, which is also a front organization run by extraterrestrials who are trying to prevent the development of cold fusion. Both are connected Roswell, NM, via a secret underground vacuum transport system. That is due to be replaced with an instantaneous "beam me up, Scotty" transport system like the one in Star Treck. They are having some trouble with flies getting mixed together with the people during transport -- a minor teething problem. That's what happened to Robert Park. Don't believe that cover-up story about the tree falling on him. Of course none of this is shown on their web site, and if you visit NIST they will deny it, but go ahead and ask. Just don't tell them you heard it from me.
Professional editors often perform a thankless job as the requirements force them to "EDIT" [...to occasionally tamper with the most intimate details of another person's precious hard work]. This inevitably leads to potential disagreements as to intent and content of particular phrases and terminology used.
As I said, I would never edit one comma without the author's permission, especially someone as temperamental as Swartz.
Since Dr. Schwartz has to the best of my knowledge not yet clarified his reasons as to why the papers have not been supplied to Mr. Rothwell in a text Acrobat format, I am forced to speculate.
Speculating about Swartz is dangerous. He may sue you.
Speculating on the motivations of another individual in the third person and with no feed-back is ALWAYS a dubious and dangerous position to get mired in. With that said, I will stick my vulnerable neck out and speculate that Dr. Schwartz simply might not be able to (for undisclosed reasons) fulfill Mr. Rothwell's seemingly simple request. . . .
Anyone with a computer can fulfill this request. I OCRed the Swartz paper and sent him back the text. It had several mistakes because the text quality was poor, but it was a short paper and he could have fixed it in an hour. I told him he could scan the images again, or mail me the paper and I would scan them. (I have two top-notch scanners and various other gadgets such as a $1,700 video screen with amazing color fidelity, and software to assemble multiple scanned images. I can have assembled single graphic images from original artwork as large as ~1.5 m^2.)
The only suggestion I could offer Mr. Rothwell and Dr. Storms, which I want to make it clear neither has asked of me nor from anyone for that matter, might be to place a great big disclaimer next to the links to the disputed papers.
There is no dispute here, and no disclaimer is needed. It is all hogwash. Swartz could upload his low-res scanned version to his own website in 10 minutes. He e-mailed the file to me; it is small. Or, he could edit the OCR text I sent him, and send back scanned images of the figures, and we could have this paper uploaded in one hour starting anytime he likes. The required effort is trivial. He has wasted ten times as much effort arguing about it!
- Jed
