Dear Lyman, Guy and Otto,

I surely agree that on-line publication is a must for the present and future. However, conference proceedings in paper form continue to be appreciated by conference attendees and that might still be the case for the near future.

In my view the correct strategy is to have a publisher which can print the proceedings and has also a digital library. Actually this was the TC6 recommendation to IFIP concerning the future publisher.

Best regards

Augusto

-----Original Message----- From: ifip-tc6-admin@Lists.RWTH-Aachen.DE [mailto:ifip-tc6-admin@Lists.RWTH-Aachen.DE]On Behalf Of Lyman Chapin Sent: quarta-feira, 6 de Novembro de 2002 00:09 To: Otto Spaniol Cc: ifip-tc6@informatik.rwth-aachen.de Subject: Re: [ifip-tc6] IFIP publications

Otto,

I agree with Guy - it doesn't matter what happens to any of the various print publishers, because the printed books are irrelevant. IFIP and TC6 must move very quickly in the direction of on-line publication; if they do not, they will also become irrelevant.

- Lyman

At 4:48 PM +0100 11/5/02, Otto Spaniol wrote:

Dear all,

a major topic for all our meetings has been (and will probably remain to be for a long time) the publication strategy of IFIP and of IFIP-TC6: Kluwer or Springer or IEEE or ....

Yesterday I got the following information: a. Springer will probably be sold to a competitor, maybe to Elsevier (and Elsevier was even more expensive as former IFIP publisher than Kluwer has ever been). b. Kluwer will probably also been sold

• either to a competitor in the same segment who would then close down the rival
• or to another company whose intentions were not really known.

For the moment being it seems that IFIP is in a severe trouble with the new publication contract. And to my opinion TC6 should also not be too much restricted to Springer as its only publisher since .... (see above).

_______________________________________________ ifip-tc6 mailing list ifip-tc6@lists.RWTH-Aachen.DE http://MailMan.RWTH-Aachen.DE/mailman/listinfo/ifip-tc6

Hi TC6, Looking at the mountains of paper around me just now - even if I for years always was fighting to reduce them - I am very happy that our central library now offers almost all journals in digital format. So now I can skip some of the 15-20 journals I subscribe privately. On my shelves I have quite a lot of IFIP proceedings, but I almost never look into them.

So the situation is as more of you write: - we still need textbooks and books covering one subject in an integrated way. Now we even have the possibilty using colours etc. - we also need journals, but on electronic form. When I need a copy of a paper I don't copy it from my own hard-copy edition, but download it from the librarey. The quality is much better. - as for conference proceedings the participants need and the authors like paper-editions. But other people in general are only interested in a couple of papers, which they may get from the author. Most people (ph.d. students etc are very specialized today. Only old professors still try to cover every subject! I would be happy to pay one euro for downloading a copy of a paper, and in total I would spend more money than I do now for buying book-proceedings. The cost of book-proceedings + mailing costs (+ 25 % VAT in Denmark) is prohibitive. If we look at the statistics most proceedings only sell very few copies in addition to the big libraries which used to buy everything.

It is of course important to consider IFIP & TC6's economy, but these problems can be solved with micro-payment/coin-click. TC6 should be in front in this development which anyway is taking place. Best regards, Villy

Villy Baek IVERSEN | Tel: (+45) 4525 3648 COM Center, Building 345v | Fax: (+45) 4593 6581 Technical University of Denmark | Mob: (+45) 2274 7345 DK-2800 Lyngby, Denmark | Email: vbi@com.dtu.dk

On Wed, 6 Nov 2002, Augusto Casaca wrote:

Dear Lyman, Guy and Otto,

I surely agree that on-line publication is a must for the present and future. However, conference proceedings in paper form continue to be appreciated by conference attendees and that might still be the case for the near future.

In my view the correct strategy is to have a publisher which can print the proceedings and has also a digital library. Actually this was the TC6 recommendation to IFIP concerning the future publisher.

Best regards

Augusto

-----Original Message----- From: ifip-tc6-admin@Lists.RWTH-Aachen.DE [mailto:ifip-tc6-admin@Lists.RWTH-Aachen.DE]On Behalf Of Lyman Chapin Sent: quarta-feira, 6 de Novembro de 2002 00:09 To: Otto Spaniol Cc: ifip-tc6@informatik.rwth-aachen.de Subject: Re: [ifip-tc6] IFIP publications

Otto,

I agree with Guy - it doesn't matter what happens to any of the various print publishers, because the printed books are irrelevant. IFIP and TC6 must move very quickly in the direction of on-line publication; if they do not, they will also become irrelevant.

• Lyman

At 4:48 PM +0100 11/5/02, Otto Spaniol wrote:

...

Dear all,

a major topic for all our meetings has been (and will probably remain to be for a long time) the publication strategy of IFIP and of IFIP-TC6: Kluwer or Springer or IEEE or ....

Yesterday I got the following information: a. Springer will probably be sold to a competitor, maybe to Elsevier (and Elsevier was even more expensive as former IFIP publisher than Kluwer has ever been). b. Kluwer will probably also been sold

• either to a competitor in the same segment who would then close down the rival
• or to another company whose intentions were not really known.

For the moment being it seems that IFIP is in a severe trouble with the new publication contract. And to my opinion TC6 should also not be too much restricted to Springer as its only publisher since .... (see above).

---

ifip-tc6 mailing list ifip-tc6@lists.RWTH-Aachen.DE http://MailMan.RWTH-Aachen.DE/mailman/listinfo/ifip-tc6

At 3:58 PM +0100 11/6/02, Otto Spaniol wrote:

Hello,

Lyman Chapin wrote (and was in line with Harry Rudin and Guy Leduc):

...

I agree with Guy - it doesn't matter what happens to any of the various print publishers, because the printed books are irrelevant. IFIP and TC6 must move very quickly in the direction of on-line publication; if they do not, they will also become irrelevant.

Hmmm. I cannot fully agree on that. Of course a CD-Rom or another electronic medium is nice, cheap and maybe unavoidable for the future. But a book is something else: from a useability aspect, from a cultural point of view,.....

Otto,

I agree with you on this; it would be terrible to do away with printed books entirely. Conference proceedings, however, are much more useful in electronic form than in printed (book) form - they are more readily accessible, they are searchable, and they can be easily referenced. The vast majority of conference papers are of no interest to anyone (other than the authors, and perhaps their academic tenure and promotion review commitees :-)) soon after they are published; a small minority continue to be of interest, and a very small minority of those become essential reference points for future work. Papers in the first category make a more valuable (if brief) contribution if they are available electronically; by the time they appear in book form, much of their (limited) usefulness has disappeared. Papers in the second and third category should appear first in electronic form (timeliness), but should also be published in printed (book or printed journal) form, as they have genuine long-term reference and archival value - and we all know how reliably "archival" electronic media are!

The major negative aspect of books is the time needed to print them and the price (which becomes higher and higher and even unaffordable if not enough books can be sold any more). My feeling is that we still need books for a while (and "for a while" could mean "for many years") in addition to electronically available material.

I think we need books for a very long while - many, many years, at least until someone has found a way for an electronic version of a paper to remain "readable" for hundreds or thousands of years. But printed books cannot be the first or only place in which research is reported. It is literally true that a paper that is not available in electronic form does not exist for most (maybe all) of the researchers who might be interested in it. That does not mean that the paper *should not* appear in printed form - only that if it does not appear in electronic form, then it doesn't matter whether it appears in printed form or not. That's what I meant by "the printed books are irrelevant" in my original message.

- Lyman