Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!mailrus!umich!itivax!dhw
From: dhw@itivax.UUCP (David H. West)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.neural-nets
Subject: Re: Neuron Digest V4 #6
Message-ID: <280@itivax.UUCP>
Date: 27 Sep 88 14:14:13 GMT
References: <8809250246.AA02504@hplpm.HPL.HP.COM> <7753@burdvax.PRC.Unisys.COM>
Organization: Institute for Defense Astrology
Lines: 37

In article <7753@burdvax.PRC.Unisys.COM>, pastor@bigburd.PRC.Unisys.COM (Jon Pastor) writes:
> There are no plans to
> publish proceedings, and the reason is financial.  INNS wished to keep the
> cost of the conference down, so as to make it accessible to as many researchers
> and students as possible.  

Ingenious.  Many of us unable to attend for financial reasons were
hoping to compensate by reading the proceedings.  I expect that
usually more people (only) read the proceedings of a conference (within 
6 months, say) than attended it.

> While making the proceedings available at an additional charge would seem to
> have been a viable alternative, the economics of publishing are such that this
> was ruled out [...]

I believe we are constrained here by those secondary goals of
academic publishing which have displaced the primary goal of
getting the information out.  The network technology that enables
you to read this message, and to obtain data from archive sites, is
capable of handling most of this problem.  There are of course 
difficulties with the volume of the data, and with diagrams, and there 
are various ways round those difficulties.

GNU (FSF) software is a fine example of how something useful but
bulky can be widely available without formal publication.  Are we
collectively too stupid to apply this lesson to non-executable
information?

The major residual problem that I see is that this method
marginalizes those without net access (or the right kind of net
access).  Again, it's hard to believe that we have insufficient
ingenuity to solve this.

-David West            dhw%iti@umix.cc.umich.edu
		       {uunet,rutgers,ames}!umix!itivax!dhw
CDSL, Industrial Technology Institute, PO Box 1485, 
Ann Arbor, MI 48106