As I see it, these ICCF proceedings papers were never really published.
Plus, people will not read papers with spelling errors and so on, so there
is no point to reprinting the papers as is. So, while I have never changed
the content, I did rewrite them. A few authors say I should reproduced
papers exactly, with every typo intact. Naturally, I will do that if the
author demands but it seems pointless to me. Anyway, as I tell these
people, LENR-CANR.org is supposed to be a useful online source of
information, not a museum for papers that no one will read because they
are so poorly written and presented.
I have had rather contentious discussions with some ICCF organizers for
several of the past conferences, and for the upcoming conference. I am
trying to ensure that the proceedings data will be preserved, and also
that minimum quality standards will be applied for things like spelling
and grammar.
what is the plan for the most recent proceedings and the forthcoming one?
Some of the recent proceedings have been printed in splendid hardback
books published by World Scientific in India. Take a close look and you
will see that for some of the papers, no one bothered to edit the content
or correct the English. So we have splendidly printed books with papers
that would not have passed high school English classes in 1975. It is
ridiculous! Presentation matters. People will not read papers they have
difficulty understanding.
Hear hear.
Jan Marwan and I have edited two ACS books so far. We had to reject some
papers for some reasons, but poor English we could deal with. We had every
paper in the books professionally copy edited. Lot of work, time and money.
I'd say only 10 percent of the authors provided work that was well-written
on the first draft. Mosier-Boss and Dash were notably superior in their
writing skills. Many of the authors also seem to have little or no
experience with the professional publishing process. I found this quite
shocking.
In a way, this book reveals the "dirty laundry" of cold fusion to the
world. It shows how many bad papers there are. I do not mind doing that.
If I could make every paper ever published available, I would.
Looking at the ICCF-4 document strictly as a book, without regard to
content, the production quality of these early proceedings is abysmal. I
do not understand why. In 1994 I could have done a much better job
scanning and printing use the paper's return on paper and not as machine
readable files (LaTex, word processor or at least a scanned image). You
have to wonder why on earth they do not demand word processor files and
why they did not preserve them.
- Jed
