At 06:42 AM 9/6/2009, you wrote:
Steven Krivit wrote:
Do you have any idea why they broke tradition and did not get it published
by World Scientific?
I do not know, but I am glad they did. Perhaps I influenced their
decision, because I recommended they stop using World Scientific. I do not
like it for several reasons, which I can enumerate here in detail if
anyone is interested. Briefly:
World Scientific gets the copyright. I oppose copyrights but if there is
going to be one, the ICCF conference and authors should retain it.
Jed,
Yeah, copyright is a bit of a throwback to the time when publishers really
did a lot for authors. But in the case where there are multiple authors
such as a proceedings, I think it helps a lot when a real publishing
business handles the job.
Let's say you want to buy a copy of the ICCF-14 proceedings in a few years
from now, or you want to get permission to republish text or image from a
paper in the proceedings. If Nagel and Melich are on a cruise ship to
Alaska for a month, you're dead in the water.
These benefits are part of what you get for your money when you use a
publisher rather than a printer.
But philosophically speaking, if the whole damn thing was electronic,
available ubiquitously, with each paper's copyright retained by each author
(like it should be) none of this would matter.
Steve
