[Air-l] access to papers online

[Scott A. Golder]

Nancy Baym wrote:
> The archives are only available to AoIR members. Access to the archives 
> is a benefit of membership, not a component of conference registration. 
> For information on becoming a member, visit the URL at the very end of 
> this message. We realize that people who attend a conference but are not 
> members are sometimes disgruntled with this. However, the archives 
> include all five conferences we have had, not just the most recent one, 
> and the membership fees are low and include a variety of discounts on 
> journal subscriptions and books as well as archive access.

I understand why multi-year archives are accessible to members only; 
after all, AoIR is an organization that costs money to run and maintain.

However, I'd suggest that the reason conference attendees have been 
disgruntled, is that AoIR's practice is wrong.  In my understanding of 
how these things work (and I may be incorrect), when people pay to go to 
a conference, they are paying for access to the materials that are 
presented there.  This includes not only the live sessions, but also the 
papers from those sessions (either digitally or hard copy).  Is this 
something that maybe varies by discipline?

Granted, if an attendee really wants a particular paper, it's pretty 
easy to email the author for a copy, but this prevents casually browsing 
through the papers.

I'm curious, what is the rationale behind the decision to not make 
papers available to the attendees of the conferences in which they were 
presented?

Scott

-----
Scott A. Golder
golder at media.mit.edu
http://www.media.mit.edu/~golder
617.877.9230