Michel Jullian wrote:
Jed, your standard is indeed best for online publishing, this kvetching amateur doesn't deny this. But please clarify: is LENR.org a publishing house or a library?
A library. We seldom publish original papers. (Except <ahem> my book . . . and a few review papers.) Everything comes from other published sources, so that makes it a library.
If it is an online library as advertised, I respectfully submit that its role is not to edit/improve the original work, especially not against the will of its author.
Now look, Michel, I already told you this. I would NEVER, EVER, NOT IN 1 MILLION YEARS DO ANYTHING AGAINST THE WLL OF THE AUTHOR. Got it? NEVER. I would not edit a paper, or upload one, or remove one. Swartz claims that I do but -- to put it bluntly -- he is full of shit.
Please get this through your head once and for all: I DO NOT ACT AGAINST THE WILL OF THE AUTHOR. Except in 3 cases out of 600 when we decided not to upload papers. That's a 0.5% rejection rate, which is much lower than a public library. All libraries reject books.
As a professional technical information publisher but, as you will certainly agree, an amateur librarian, you could take example on Google Books, or Amazon Look/Search Inside, who provide high quality scanned images of the original works, see e.g.
First of all, the images supplied by Swartz was not high quality. They were dreadful, like a fax machine copy. I do not think any self-respecting web master would upload them. Second, Google and Amazon books may upload images, but scientific publishers do not do this anymore, because text quality and precision is more important in scientific publication than ordinary publications. See: http://arxiv.org/help/faq/whytex
and try the search function, you'll see it is quite usable.
The search function works because the documents have been partially or fully OCRed, usually with lots of mistakes. In some sites they are OCRed on demand, which generates even more errors. As long as you are going to the trouble to OCR a document you might as well spend an extra hour or two and do it right.
Would you agree to a searchable image pdf format of this kind of quality?
No. The quality of searchable PDF files is lousy, and they cannot be read by some PDF readers, especially ones in Japan, China and other non-European languages. There is no benefit to this format, other than the time it saves to prepare the document, and as I said, an author should be willing to spare an hour for an audience of 300,000 people per year. I set these standards for good reasons. I have dealt with hundreds of authors and every one of them was pleased to take some time to proofread papers. Swartz is the only author who has ever complained or asked me to upload papers in some other format.
Would Mitchell?
Of course not! He will not upload these papers in any format, at his site, my site or any other. His complaints about the format are bogus nonsense. If I agreed to upload his unreadable scans, he would immediately come up with some other excuse, and he would demand that I remove the papers or face a lawsuit. It is all an act -- it is nothing but bogus excuses and nonsense. If he had any intention of making these papers available he would have uploaded them to his own website years ago.
- Jed
