Dear Guy (Leduc),
thank you very much for your comments.
Given the following paragraph I'm wondering in which sense the conditions are very good...
- the contract will be much more binding for us than in the past (where we did do essentially what we wanted, i.e. publication A with publisher X, publication B with publisher Y etc.). From 2005 onwards, every publication of an IFIP event must be offered first to the official IFIP publisher.
The requirement that IFIP (and TC6 in particular) has to offer every proceedings first to the IFIP publisher was always valid but the behaviour of TC6 (namely to have a real "zoo" of publishers) was tolerated without any enthousiasm; the reason for that was that IFIP knew very well that Kluwer was much too expensive for many event organisors.
In the new contract the financial conditions are much more attractive for the organisors. Thus the high price per copy cannot be considered any more as an excuse for choosing another publisher. Considering the visibility of IFIP and the branding of the name "IFIP" it will be indeed better to have a single powerful publisher for all IFIP events.
Best regards Otto