Dear Otto and everyone,
This e-mail is to inform you about the situation concerning IFIP publications by Springer.
First, for IWQoS'05, Herman de Meer informed me that Alfred Hofmann has offered to provide more free copies to compensate for the higher price.
This means that Springer implicitely recognises his mistake in making two different offers for IFIP and non IFIP labelled conferences.
Based on this, I have sent to Alfred Hofmann the mail attached hereafter. We are now waiting for his answer.
Moreover, we have another argument we can use to motivate for same prices for IFIP and non IFIP labelled LNCS conferences. By reading clause 12 of the agreement between IFIP and Springer:
12. IFIP shall make its best endeavours, through its Technical Committees and Groups, to reach and surpass a goal of delivering 30 volumes in time for publication in each of the years covered by this Agreement, 2005 to 2009, inclusive. No litigation is intended from The Publisher should IFIP fall short of this goal. The Publisher is willing to publish as many volumes in any year which meet the criteria set out in clause 2.
This means that Springer should not make less attractive publication offers for IFIP conference organisers, otherwise IFIP will not be able to meet the goal of 30 Springer publications per year.
Depending on the answer from Springer, we may recur to this argument in a second stage.
Best regards,
Elie