Los Alamos National Laboratory          

VIA FACSIMILE & MAIL

Mr. John Threadgill
Threadgll & Associates
Attorneys and Counselors at Law
A Professional Corporation
Riverview Tower, Suite 1500
900 South Gay Street
Knoxville, TN 37902-1810

RE: Robert Gentry

Dear Mr. Threadgill:

This letter is in response to your letter of July 30, 2001 in which you ask the Laboratory to re-consider arXiv's requirements related to multiple postings and institutional affiliation. Please be advised that we have considered your arguments and have concluded that the archival service's requirements are reasonable and are designed to serve legitimate purposes. No discrimination has occurred. Your client may post his submission as one piece if he meets the requirements outlined in my June 18, 2001 letter to you.

In your July letter, you suggest that the requirement of an institutional affiliation is not consistently applied and suggest that this requirement is designed to thwart Mr. Gentry's interest in posting his work. Please be assured that this is not the case. The specific person you cite in your letter, David Apsel, was in fact sponsored by a physics professor from The College of Wooster in Ohio. Having identified the affiliation in this case, it is nonetheless important to remember that the service receives approximately 35,000 postings a year. The archive has a extremely small staff. Thus while the archive is unaware of specific instances, it is conceivable that there are some small number of papers posted that do not fall withing the requirements previously described. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the staff makes every effort to be alert to the archive's requirements and to be diligent in applying them with consistency.

In sum, the requirements of the arXiv remain as previously stated.

Sincerely,

Christine Chandler
Attorney for the
Los Alamos National Laboratory

CC:rd

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