gill1109 wrote:Your first step should have been to approach me directly, assuming good faith on my part, with a personal request. Instead, you started out of the blue uttering threats and issuing deadlines on a public forum, without notifying me personally that this was what you were planning to do.
In other words, your position is that you will continue the dissemination of a defamatory article against me, and will not take the necessary steps to correct the record because my notice to you was public and not private? This cannot be a reasonable position as your ethics office will advise you.
*If* you now switch to normal civilized behaviour, I could perhaps consider adding a note on the front page of the current version saying, for instance, that all previous versions contain some serious errors and should be ignored. Perhaps we could hold a Zoom meeting to agree on a mutually acceptable formulation? Or each nominate a lawyer to hold such a meeting on our behalves?
I have acted very reasonably. You are of course free to have a different opinion. All that matters is that you are have been made aware of the error in published versions of your paper. You are also aware of how to remedy the problem, and the ethical basis for the requested remedy. In my opinion, your initial attempts were completely inappropriate and did more harm than correcting the record, as evidenced by changing the abstract from "
without any documentation at all" to "
very little documentation", to "
little documentation", to completely removing the phrase without any correction notice added. This is what you have done since receiving notice. It is not enough. We don't need any zoom meeting. If you want you can seek legal representation on your own.
If you manage to get arXiv.org (or Researchers.one, or Preprint.org) to remove old versions or paste a "retracted" note on them, I would be surprised. But I would have no problem with that. You can't rewrite history. In fact, you are writing new history by your current actions.
It is not my problem what your publishers can or can not do. You published the articles with them containing the errors, you must correct the record together with them. If you think it is okay to publish a defamatory article and then later claim "sorry it's on arxiv and I can't take it down anymore", then you have found a loophole that allows anyone to defame anyone else without recourse. This cannot stand. But I have already shown you that arxiv has procedures for resolving problems like these. You've simply decided you will not follow them.
By the way, I do not agree that my original paper was defamatory of you. Moreover, I have kept you in touch with all developments of that research over the 7 or more years since my first RPubs publications of my versions of your model.
There is a record on this forum of our discussions concerning my simulations and the result of those discussions leading to a breakdown in communication and the reasons why. Those discussions were from a few days after the code was published on GitHub in March 2014 and contain an extensive reference to the README files. (See
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=23&p=613&hilit=README#p613) for example, and the other comments in that thread.
I objected to the contents of the paper but I was willing to let it stand as differences of opinion until I discovered you had published new versions in 2020 which included defamatory misstatements of fact. I discovered these versions on Tuesday this week. I have not asked you to take down the original version. I have been very specific about the remedy I'm seeking and those requests are reasonable. If the only way for you to fix the issue is to take down all versions, then you will have to decide if your preference is to continue the dissemination of defamatory information about me, over withdrawing an article you have described yourself as "
obscure paper in which nobody has any interest at all". Secondly, the most damaging allegations in your paper were introduced in January last year
after I had informed you in response to a question by email privately that the documentation was included in the original version of the code and has been there ever since. If you do not remember, please review our email conversation from Dec 31, 2019 to Jan 3, 2020. Note that the problematic versions were published from Jan 1, 2020 to Jan 6, 2020.
A withdrawal that includes a notice with
clear details of the error and the reason for withdrwal will be satisfactory. This is possible according to the Arxiv process I've previously linked.
By the way, my work showed that your models have some very serious blemishes (in common with the Pearle model). I suggest you look for ways to improve them. Though, since we now have had successful "loophole-free" experiments using pulsed emissions and fixed time slots, that is really superfluous. Models which effectively exploit the detection and coincidence loopholes have mainly historical interest.
This is irrelevant to the issue at hand. You never understood the point of the models as I tried to explain to you multiple times. But you are free to write whatever you want about my models. But you are not allowed to misstate facts and add demonstrably false defamatory statements about me.
Emails from me to Michel are presently being blocked by him. I just emailed him the new “title page” of the arXiv version of my paper. So he will have to wait till Monday to see it. More delay in arriving at a mutually agreeable resolution. He had better unblock me and send me an email if he wants this issue resolved in a civilized fashion.
I am not going to describe here the reasons why I blocked your emails but I can assure everyone it was not because of unreasonableness on my part. If you want me to describe why I blocked you, I can do so. But that is irrelevant at this point. Since blocking your emails, you have since found a way to email me and we have exchanged a few often very pleasant emails since. This included our communication from 2019/2020. I have not blocked any further emails from you since then, although it is possible that previous email addresses are still blocked. I have not received any new emails from you with a corrected title page but if such a revision contains a correction notice that is consistent with "
The correction notice should provide clear details of the error and the changes that have been made to the Version of Record. ", then that will be acceptable.