I do not know who to ask. ChatGPT?
Nope. It still makes up stuff. I've been using Bard with some success ... then click on the "Google" button and it will try to check against web sources. (Green confirmed, Red contrary information).
Edmund Storms Reading Room project at LENR-CANR.org
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Interesting opinion on this from 'somebody who knows'. It must remain anonymous since it was a private email. (slightly edited byy me)
"... it is most important to make old papers available, especially if they are wrong. And it is very helpful to write a letter or review in which you cite and catagorize the types of errors.
The authors of an old paper probably don't believe it's conclusions anymore either. Old papers are useful in measuring the effort and the errors and misconceptions. We should thank everyone who works in the field and not hide their efforts because of errors or the bad luck of choosing the wrong metal supplier.
Now when you aren't sure the author or publisher wants you to post the article, it is important to follow copyright law, bearing in mind the consequences of getting it wrong. But almost all authors do want their works available. They are not worried about the unlikely lost revenue from failing to sell an old paper to a new publisher. So keep the author's interest in mind.
Social media benefits from the DMCA law which means the social media company isn't responsible for pre-checking copyrights of user posts, but is responsible for reasonably rapidly responding to take-down requests from copyright holders. That law doesn't allow the social media site to be an editor however. It may be that making part of your site link to a social media site and inviting others to share papers there would reduce your workload and legal vulnerability. I don't know which social media site you would best use for that... but a number might work. How well would your own google group do? Your own Discord or Slack site? Is there a good Reddit group?- that might be hard to manage."
Does LENR forum qualify as 'social media'???
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... it is most important to make old papers available, especially if they are wrong.
The problem with a paywall is that you pay for 100 garbage papers to find one useful... Only research center give you open end access to the big three science news corporations heap of garbage with low marble count.
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Does LENR forum qualify as 'social media'???
I think the answer to that is yes, but there are several branches of social media and perhaps legislation is different for every branch.
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Interesting opinion on this from 'somebody who knows'. It must remain anonymous since it was a private email. (slightly edited byy me)
I think this is a good post - and does highlight that the true desire of the researchers is always to have their papers read.
Although I was never a member, I attended the 2014 UK Pirate Party national conference in Manchester. A large number of the activists I met were academics, who were frustrated by the stranglehold that publishers had on academic publishing, and at how they exploited laws that were supposedly enacted to protect the rights of authors - but really allowed publishers to operate a monopolistic cartel on the distribution of information.
I remember a talk by one academic who detailed the stupid situation where he had published a paper in a journal that had been dropped from the "bundles" to which his University library subscribed - and it meant that he would personally have to pay the publisher around $30 just to access the published version of his own paper. Also, even though he was the author - sending free copies of the published version of his own paper to other researchers was deemed to be a breach of the publishers copyright. Many authors would do that, if personally asked - but they risked being taken to court by their publisher, if caught.
It was probably around that time that the #ICanHazPDF hashtag was circulating on twitter - as academics posted appeals for certain papers, that they couldn't get through their own university subscriptions. Academics at institutions that did have access would download the paper, place it in a "disposable" public site, and send the person who wanted the paper a link (either in a tweet or a private message). Afterwards, both parties would delete their tweets to cover their tracks. And yes, this is insane - but that was what the publishers had driven them to. Don't forget that Elsevier took social media sites ResearchGate.net and Academia.com to court in an attempt to prevent them from hosting papers on their sites, that were uploaded by authors. (They failed to close those sites, but that doesn't mean all social media sites are in the clear. Those sites have had to make a special deal with the publishers to continue operating.)
To understand the immoral exploitation of the entire copyright system you have to go back to its origins, and the 1709 Statute of Anne. (Yes, really). Copyright was never really about protecting the rights of authors, but it was used as an excuse for publishers to protect their monopolistic business models. And it still is.
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Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?The long read: It is an industry like no other, with profit margins to rival Google – and it was created by one of Britain’s most notorious tycoons: Robert…www.theguardian.com
This is a decent business history of scientific publishing.
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I wonder whether they could simply be uploaded to Archive.org? Steven Krivit has uploaded some of his library there.
eg:
New Energy Times Richard Garwin Cold Fusion Archive - box2-11b : Steven B. Krivit : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet ArchiveSupplemental reference material from Fusion Fiasco: Explorations in Nuclear Research, Vol. 2, by Steven B. Krivit. Archival documents from the 1989 cold...archive.org -
I wonder whether they could simply be uploaded to Archive.org? Steven Krivit has uploaded some of his library there.
eg:
Some stuff there still requires payment to be accessed.
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This is a decent business history of scientific publishing
That certainly brings back some memories. I used to visit the Pergamon staff social club, in Oxford, in the late 80s (I was in a social group that had a lot of Pergamon employees, so we often met in one of their bars). I would hear hilarious tales of the ongoing exploits of "Cap'n Bob" (as Private Eye used to call Maxwell). But it wasn't so funny when his business skulduggery unravelled.
The Guardian story is rather UK-centric, though. Cap'n Bob may have been a scoundrel, but it's over 30 years since he drowned, and the whole academic publishing industry has continued on its downward path ever since.
What does need to be highlighted is the shock that reverberated through the industry, and its critics, by the tragic death of Aaron Swartz, in 2013. The industry was beginning to realise that they had pushed people to the point where guerrilla warfare felt like a valid and ethical option. You can read Aaron's 2008 2 page Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto here.
After this, the main publishers started to cook-up various "open access" schemes, although in some ways they simply succeeded in facilitating another set of money-making scams (i.e. predatory journals).
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>This is fig leaf approach.
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I would hear hilarious tales of the ongoing exploits of "Cap'n Bob" (as Private Eye used to call Maxwell). But it wasn't so funny when his business skulduggery unravelled.
I may have mentioned this before, but Maxwell once chastised one of his layout guys for NOT spelling 'nuclear' as 'nucular'.
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ED STORMS READING ROOM
(social media zone)
@ Jed Rothwell - Fixed that for you.
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ED STORMS READING ROOM
(social media zone)
I gather social media is not exempt from the DCMA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) rules. What I know about the DMCA would fit in a matchbook cover, to use an expression people born after 1960 probably would not understand.
I will upload many of these documents to the main files at LENR-CANR.org. Right now I am working on a document about the May 1989 APS meeting. It includes newspaper reports, a press conference transcript, and the abstracts. It has many juicy quotes, such as:
PROF. MEYERHOF:
. . . Now, I believe the thermometer -- I'm sorry, I believe the calorimeter of the Stanford group in the Mechanical Engineering Department under Professor Huggins, had a very simple calorimeter consisting just of a glass. And therefore, they did find what they call excess power because at the position of . . . their thermometer, it turns out the average temperature is too high at that point. Now the Utah group had a more refined calorimeter, namely they had a kind of thermos bottle. But unfortunately, when you look at the picture of the thermos bottle, you see that there is no more thermos bottle effect at the neck of this thermos bottle. The neck is fused together, there is no vacuum between them. And depending on how high the water is inside and outside, heat can leak out through that neck. So, they have a more non-uniform temperature in their calorimeter than you would normally have if you had a proper thermos bottle. So that's very unfortunate. And therefore, because of this temperature variation and again, because of the position of where their thermometer was, they saw something that they interpreted as excess power, which unfortunately, is not true.
So I can summarize the findings of my calculation a little limerick, which I hope you don't take too seriously, although I think it has -- the whole thing has very, very serious consequences, it has upset the whole country; government agencies have been upset. so my limerick is the following: Tens of millions of dollars are at stake, dear sister and brother, because some scientists put a thermometer at one place and not another. (Laughter.)
Pop Quiz:How many mistakes did Meyerhof cram into those two paragraphs?
Is it possible he read a paper by Huggins or F&P at that date?
As far as I know, no information was available at that time. For example, there was no description of F&P's half-silvered Dewar cell which channeled most of the heat out of the bottom below the water line. Very little heat goes through the neck. I cannot fault Meyerhof for making mistakes about experiments he knew nothing about. He did not have ESP. However, when you know nothing about an experiment, it is not good form to pontificate about it, or ridicule it. You should not assume that Martin Fleischmann, FRS, Pres. Electrochemical Society would make an amateur mistake doing electrochemistry, using a technique developed by Faraday.
