[Conferences-discuss] Printed proceedings?

[Guido van Rossum]

> There are some inherent problems with having a printed proceedings book:
> 
>   * cost of printing and binding

Which are higher than you think.

>   * the overhead of having a program committee review and accept/reject
>     papers (but this also serves as an important quality control
>     filter -- usually the dross doesn't get into the conference)

Plus the requirement for presenters to produce both slides *and* a
written paper worth printing -- and the latter has to be ready long
before the conference.

> There are also some implementation problems with the proceedings books I
> have seen so far; I think the biggest one is simply this: no copy
> editor!  As near as I can tell, no one is responsible for making sure
> that the published papers are grammatically and orthographically
> correct, or that the formatting isn't all screwed up.  (Take a look at
> Martin von Loewis' paper in the IPC10 proceedings to see a classic
> "formatting all screwed up" paper.  It's not fatal, but it sure is
> annoying.)  I've been on the program committee several times, and the
> first couple of times I went after grammatical/spelling/formatting
> problems with a vengeance.  This year, I realized that was pointless
> when the paper might end up being rejected, so AFAIK no one ever fixed
> up the grammar/formatting of the published papers.  (The only one I've
> read so far is Martin's, which had some minor German-isms in the grammar
> that -- along with the bad formatting -- would have been fixed by a
> proper copy-edit.)

The formatting screw-up is annoying; this happens often because the
formatting is done by Foretec personnel who aren't really qualified.
We've had accidents like this every year as I recall.

Copy-editing is very expensive and doesn't happen for any conference
materials ever, except for very expensive ones.  Most academic
conferences can't afford this.

> So: how does everyone feel about having published papers coming out the
> conference?  In short, is it worth the time, effort, and expense?

Not to me.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)