[Air-l] access to papers online

[Nancy Baym]

>
>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?

Brief versions:

- the decision to make sure there are benefits of paid membership and 
hence incentives for joining AoIR other than the altruistic 
motivation of wanting to do one's part to sustain a network one finds 
valuable

- creating a single password system for members that allows access to 
all archives and other member-only material is considerably less 
burdunsome than a separate set of passwords for attendees of each 
conference for each separate conference archive. Again the reminder 
you're no doubt sick of my repeating is that we are only able to do 
as much as our members are willing to do, and creating and 
maintaining multi-level web sites and password systems are not high 
priorities.

-- the cost of membership is less than the difference between 
conference registration for members and nonmembers, so unless 
registration fees are covered by one's institution but membership 
isn't, there is little incentive not to become a member before 
registering anyway.

I will say also that in 5 years of doing it this way, we've heard 
about 3 or 4 complaints. That's not to say others don't share your 
sentiment, I know some do. However, there does not seem to be a 
strong sentiment againt AoIR's position on this.

I know many conferences sell cd-roms of the papers presented there at 
an additional cost rather than included with conference registration, 
so perhaps this is something that does vary across disciplines. It is 
always a challenge for AoIR to meet the expectations of so many 
disciplinary traditions with such varied ways of being normal.

Nancy
-- 
Nancy Baym	http://www.ku.edu/home/nbaym
Communication Studies, University of Kansas
Bailey Hall, 1440 Jayhawk Blvd., Room 102, Lawrence, KS 66045-7574, USA
Association of Internet Researchers: http://aoir.org