External Sources

We frequently include copies of material from web sites outside our own. In a way, this defeats the purpose of the web —one copy used multiple times— but we feel that mirroring is important, especially in Scientology criticism. We explain our reasons, as well as how we handle these sources on our site, below.

Preservation

Citation Decay

Our primary reason for providing copies of external sources is to preserve pages that we reference and depend on to support our arguments. Important critical, educational, and informational pages have gone offline over time and we've lost access to valuable data. We don't want to lose anything further.

A study conducted by two academics at Iowa State University has shown a remarkably high rate of "decay" for online citations. Michael Bugeja, professor of journalism and communication, and Daniela Dimitrova, assistant professor of communication, looked at five prestigious communication-studies journals from 2000 to 2003 and found 1,126 footnotes that cite online resources. Of those, 373 did not work at all, a decay rate of 33 percent; of those that worked, only 424 took users to information relevant to the citation. In one of the journals in the study, 167 of 265 citations did not work. … Anthony T. Grafton, a professor of history at Princeton University and author of a book on footnotes, agreed that citation decay is a real and growing problem, describing the situation as "a world in which documentation and verification melt into air."

-Chronicle of Higher Education , 14 March 2005 (subscription required)

Censorship Attempts

The Church expends considerable effort to keep critical information out of public view; we want to help ensure they are not successful.

We do not want Scientology to be reported in the press, anywhere else than on the religious pages of newspapers. Therefore, we should be very alert to sue for slander at the slightest chance so as to discourage the public presses from mentioning Scientology.

-L. Ron Hubbard, as quoted by the Evening Argus

And we heartily agree with Hubbard's support of free speech:

I do not believe any public figure has a right to suppress the use of his name in articles. I do not believe a public figure should enforce his will on writers or organizations…. I believe a democracy ceases to exist when deprived of freedom of speech.

-L. Ron Hubbard, HCOB 24 April 1960, "Concerning the Campaign for Presidency"

However, the Church does not extend such support to critics. See Chilling Effects  to read about the Church's aggressive use of the DMCA to force Google  to suppress links to Operation Clambake , the web's largest and most frequented site critical of Scientology. The Church has also tried to censor critical web sites by accusing them of infringement for using trademarked terms such as "Scientology", "Dianetics", and "L. Ron Hubbard" in their metatags.

We do not include web pages from official Church of Scientology sites, except as excerpted in accordance with the Fair Use clause of the U.S. Copyright Act.

Offline Reading

Additionally, this collection of external files is useful for the DVD version of our site, making a relatively self-contained disk that, for the most part, does not require an internet connection to browse. This works for our zipped file, too: you can download our entire site and conveniently read it offline. [Download , about 3.2 MB, expands to about 9.5 MB]

Internal Referencing

Finally, having our own copy of reference works allows us to link directly to the portion of interest by adding HTML tags at the appropriate location in the document's code. Even though we may reference only a small portion, we generally host the entire book, essay, article, affidavit, etc., to provide a broad range of information about the Church of Scientology.

Modifications

We have made no modifications to the content of the web pages mirrored on our site without the permission of the authors, except as follows.

• Typos, grammatical mistakes, misspellings, and similar errors may be annotated to indicate corrections. We may correct scanning or transcription errors in books, tapes or other publications if we have access to a physical copy for comparison.
• We may add notes or links pointing to supplemental or related material.
• We may repair broken links in original works: generally we will fix navigation links within documents; we may or may not fix outbound links.

We have taken the liberty of making HTML/CSS code changes so our pages validate , and other cosmetic changes so that pages fit into our general site design.

Attributions are given for all documents and, in most cases, links to online sources are included to allow you to verify the faithfulness of our mirrored versions.

Public Discussion

We believe these documents contain important ideas and information that should be discussed publicly. They are provided for educational and research purposes only, without profit to the editors. Their inclusion does not significantly affect the market for the original work.