Angela wrote:
Note that
authors of accepted papers are expected to attend
the conference and present the paper, otherwise
publication will be canceled.
That seems like a good way to ensure it remains a strictly North
American affair...
The same rule applied last year when WikiSym was held in what was
possibly the worst place for international travelers to get to (37
hours for me) yet certainly wasn't a Danish-only, or even
European-only, affair. I don't think it's unusual for conferences to
require that people attend the conference if they want to have their
paper published in the proceedings is it?
Yeah, this is pretty much standard for academic conferences, for better
or worse. Conferences want to ensure that: 1) they'll get paid the
registration fee, which supports their costs; and 2) that a conference
with presentations actually happens, rather than people just using the
proceedings as a place to publish a paper.
There's occasional debate in computer science, where conferences are
considered a major publication venue (unlike most other fields, which
mainly use journals) about whether this is good, bad, or neither. On
the plus side, it promotes collaboration and more direct peer review by
encouraging/forcing annual face-to-face meetings with presentations,
panels, and question/answer sessions. The annual nature with submission
deadlines also tends to promote more timely publication of results, even
preliminary ones, and researchers at academic institutions usually can
also get a grant or institution pay for the trip. On the minus side,
it raises the financial cost of publication for independent researchers
(compared to journals, which are usually free to publish in). Not a
debate we're likely to resolve on this mailing list, since it's been
going on (in CS anyway) for decades...
-Mark