What went wrong with: "The Interaction of Neutrons With 7Be: "Lack of Standard Nuclear Physics Solution to the "Primordial 7Li Problem"", by M. Gai [arXiv:1812.09914v1]?

Abstract

We comment here on results of the project aimed at measuring the 7Be(n,x) reactions at SARAF, Israel, in 2016, posted by M. Gai in [arXiv:1812.09914v1] without the knowledge of parts of the collaboration and against the explicit veto of the collaborators and the administration of the Paul Scherrer Institut, Switzerland. We address both the experimental shortcomings and the drawbacks in project conduction. M. Gais preprint is labeled as "on behalf of the SARAF Israel-US-Switzerland Collaboration", the author list is given as a reference to another unpublished contribution (cited as [27]) to the NPA8 conference in June 2017 in Catania). However, M. Gai did never have the right to report on unpublished proprietary data of the entire collaboration, and he was not authorized to act "on behalf of the collaboration". The contribution is declared as "accepted for publication", but in fact was retracted during the refereeing process. After several careful data evaluations, we have to state that the results of these measurements are not trustworthy and neither the given experimental data basis nor the corresponding data analysis can be improved further. Therefore, we requested to retract the posting immediately [arXiv:1904.03023]. We have to emphasize that, in our opinion, arXiv is not the appropriate platform for handling frictions in a collaboration. These problems should have been solved internally before publishing. Unfortunately, with his single-handed posting against the explicit disagreement of parts of the collaboration, M. Gai did not leave another possibility. With the present article, we expressed all our concerns and objections and we consider herewith the public discussion of this issue as closed.Comment: arXiv admin note: This version has been removed by arXiv administrators due to copyright infringemen