Robin van Spaandonk wrote: In reply to Dr. Mitchell Swartz's message of Tue, 29 Sep 2009 13:44:24 -0400:
> Hi, > [snip] > > Corroborating your fabrications, Jed, you have told others and us > >that you demand to EDIT the papers. > [snip] > ..from the perspective of an outsider to all of this, I get the impression > that > Jed edit's papers to make them more comprehensible, however I can > understand > that some authors would object to any interference at all. Swartz's assertions are crazy nonsense. I would never demand to edit papers. Editing is tedious and thankless work. I would no more DEMAND you let me do that than I would DEMAND you let me come to your house, do the laundry, and spray for cockroaches. Any time an author says he does not want me to edit something, I leave it alone. Often this results in a paper that is incomprehensible that no one will download or read. I know this for a fact, because I have detailed statistics from LENR-CANR showing which papers are popular and which are ignored. However, if an author wants me to upload an incomprehensible paper that no one will read, that's his or her business. It will not cost me any bandwidth, so why should I care? As I said there are thousands of authors and about a thousand papers by now so it makes no difference if there are a few duds. When I am preparing papers for a proceedings, that's another matter. The editors of proceedings usually want to impose some format uniformity because it makes the book more professional looking. Such as having all papers start with an abstract which is block text indented on both sides. Also, the editors do not want to publish papers with spelling mistakes and incomprehensible English. So they turn to me, because I have been writing and editing technical documentation for 35 years and I know much more about Microsoft Word than most scientists do. The decision to edit these papers is made by the editors (Hagelstein, Biberian, Melich . . .) not by me. Naturally, I approve. The earlier unedited proceedings were an embarrassment. Highly unprofessional. Ed and I have on rare occasions turned down papers altogether. Maybe 3 to 5 times. These papers were off-topic, crazy, utterly incomprehensible, or handwritten and illegible. Generally speaking though, if you can get a paper published in a proceedings or journal anywhere, and it has some connection to cold fusion, we'll take it. We never turn down papers because we disagree with them. On the contrary, for years I have been trying to get more of the skeptics to contribute papers. - Jed
