publication of IASS papers on CDROM

[hans henrich hock]

I strongly support Dominik's view.

Hans Henrich Hock


>As those of you who attended the Torino WSC will know, the conference
>organisers are proposing to publish the conference proceedings as a CDROM,
>not a printed book.
>
>Personally, I am not happy with a CDROM publication for my own paper.  It
>really needs to be in print or not at all, I think, and for several
>reasons.
>
>It is a fact, perhaps unfortunate, perhaps not, that the system of
>academic credit is still narrowly focussed on printed publication.
>
>There are also all sorts of other, technical reasons why a CDROM is
>unsuitable, in my view.  It will almost certainly be unreadable in ten or
>twenty years, whereas a book will still be no problem.  The computer
>screen is no medium for serious reading.  Will special characters be
>elegantly and appropriately handled?  And so on.
>
>There are also all the issues that have been so elegantly raised by
>Willard Mccarty in several papers, including:
>  http://ilex.cc.kcl.ac.uk/wlm/essays/Challenges/
>and
>  http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/wlm/essays/potency0.html
>and others on the same website.
>
>I know, because people have written to me, that I am not alone in being
>very unhappy at the idea of CDROM-only proceedings.
>
>May I start a discussion here about this topic, and if a consensus emerges
>that the CDROM is a mistake, then perhaps some of us should send a
>petition along to Torino and to the IASS board and request the parties
>concerned kindly to consider a change of policy on this issue.
>
>Best wishes,
>Dominik Wujastyk