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From: pastor@bigburd.PRC.Unisys.COM (Jon Pastor)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.neural-nets
Subject: Re: Neuron Digest V4 #6
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Date: 26 Sep 88 19:43:33 GMT
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I'm sure that this will be noticed by others, but there were two requests
posted for two different sets of proceedings.  The information given was
correct for the proceedings of the ICNN conference in San Diego, but one
of the requests specifically asked about the INNS conference in Boston
(6-10 September).

I spent a good deal of time talking with representatives of INNS *and*
Pergamon Press (the publishers of the journal Neural Networks, including
the special issue containing the abstracts for INNS).  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.  The INNS board decided that the inclusion of
proceedings would have increased the cost of conference registration by an 
unacceptable amount (let's say, $90, based on the ICNN Proceedings costs).
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 (INNS would have had to print some number of copies with no
guaranteed sales, and at a higher per-unit cost due to smaller print run).
There was talk of publishing some of the papers in one or more special issues
of Neural Networks, but nothing definite.  

I would like to see proceedings.  However, unless INNS and Pergamon can be
convinced that neither of them will be left holding a lot of expensive 
inventory, it is unlikely that either of them will be willing to incur the
production and editorial costs.  If there are any members of the INNS board
reading this newsgroup, I would be interested in hearing what the break-even
level for printing proceedings would be, and in finding out whether a 
sufficient number of *prepaid* orders would be a sufficient incentive for 
pursuing the issue.

INNS is a young organization, and not yet a wealthy one.  Attempting to place
the conference within the financial reach of people who are not on company
expense accounts is laudable (it so happens that I attended INNS on my own
funds this year...), but I am not convinced that it's worth the lack of
proceedings.