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Physics Journals that Encourage New
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Apeiron

Progress in
Physics
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Brian Josephson
has written the following in response to a letter by Ginsparg
(April 2014)
Scientist
blacklisting practice is now adopted by peer reviewed physics
journals. Carlos Castro Perelman reports.
Correspondence with Cornell re the unsatisfactory
management of the physics preprint archive, Compiled by
Nobel Laureate Brian Josephson.
New
Article Exposes Corruption of Science in America (2011)
Radio
Interview of Carlos Castro Perelman speaking about suppression
by Arxiv.org (May 23, 2005)
May 10, 2005 New Energy Times story
(Issue No. 9):
ArchiveFreedom.org Founded to Fight Scientific
Censorship
February 24, 2005
correspondence letter to Nature sent by Nobel
Laureate Brian Josephson in response to the November 25, 2004
Nature news item, also copied below.
Correspondence Nature 433,
800 (24 February 2005)
Vital
resource should be open to all physicists
Putting
control in the hands of a few can enforce
orthodoxy and stifle innovative ideas.
Sir --
Your News story "Rejected physicists instigate anti-arXiv
site" (Nature 432, 428 - 429;
2004)
reports a response from Paul Ginsparg, the founder of the preprint
server arXiv.org, to criticisms of its publication policies.
Ginsparg states that the rules governing who can and cannot
publish are clearly stated on the site, and that the archive
is designed for "communication among research professionals,
not as a mechanism for outsiders to communicate to that community".
The cases documented by myself
and others on the ArchiveFreedom website show that there is more
to the story.
The exclusion of particular individuals
and particular ideas from arXiv appears to me to be deliberate.
If a rule can be invoked in support, however tenuous the
link, the rule is quoted; otherwise, submissions are simply 'deleted
as inappropriate'. For example, having stated that a very
distinguished physicist's strong support of a submission carried
no weight because this physicist "was not intimately familiar
with the work in question", the moderators simply ignored
subsequent support from an endorser with publications on the
same subject.
In another example, the moderators'
response to the information that more than one eminent physicist
had an interest in a subject that they wished to bar was: "We
are always thrilled to hear when people find an avocation that
keeps them off the streets and out of trouble."
ArXiv has become a vital communicative
resource for the physics community. The moderators' attitude
to any challenge to conventional thinking is likely to result
in the loss to science of important innovative ideas. Radical
changes are required in the way the archive is administered.
Brian
D. Josephson
Department
of Physics,
University of Cambridge,
Cambridge CB3 0HE, UK
News
Nature, volume 432, November 25, 2004, pages 428-429
[WASHINGTON]
Researchers who feel they have been unfairly excluded from the
arXiv physics preprint server now have a new home on the Internet.
The
'archive freedom' site, developed by a handful of frustrated
researchers, hosts the stories of physicists who, they claim,
have been "blacklisted" by arXiv's operators at Cornell
University in Ithaca, New York. The site includes information
about Robert Gentry, a geophysicist formerly at Oak Ridge National
Laboratory in Tennessee. Gentry, a Seventh Day Adventist and
creationist, lost a legal action this March in which he had accused
arXiv of religious discrimination in rejecting his papers on
an alternative to the Big Bang theory (see Nature 428,
458; 2004).
Paul Ginsparg, a physicist at Cornell
who founded arXiv in 1991, defends the archive's policies and
says the rules governing who can and cannot publish are clearly
stated on the site. The archive is not a fully open forum, he
adds, and is designed for "communication among research
professionals, not as a mechanism for outsiders to communicate
to that community"
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