I must admit to being a little baffled by some of the discussion about AoIR conference papers online. I'll try to separate out my grumble from the rest.
<grumble>The grumble is that, when paying to attend a conference, it is normal practice to get access to copies of papers presented. I'm afraid I don't follow the coercion line of reasoning. In what sense is making papers available via the web to AoIR members not coercive, but making them available in whatever format to conference attenders coercive? (Rather, if there is any 'coercion' it appears to be to join AoIR as well as attend the conference). If people want to present, but not have their papers made available, presumably a tick-box on a submission sheet would handle a lot of the apparent difficulties. Finally, I understand that AoIR is not a well resourced organisation, relying heavily on volunteer effort. However, at a more material level, the cost of the conference was comparable with that of many conferences that do make papers available. Perhaps the planners for Toronto might think about factoring the costs of producing a CD-ROM into the cost of future events - it oughtn't cost a great deal, since I don't think anyone would expect particularly fancy production.</grumble>
More interestingly, as others have pointed out, there is some evidence
that use of (citations of) papers made available online is higher than otherwise. Jason's comments about on-line publishing also increasing the use of conventionally published articles by the same authors is some evidence of something I've suspected personally for a little while (thinking about how I use papers myself). Rather than leaving AoIR members (and/or conference presenters) to put their papers online individually, and scattered across cyberspace, a better service to members (and presenters) might well be to make papers freely available on the web (in a non-coercive manner, of course) in one place, under the banner of AoIR.
On a slightly different tack, in response to Denise, I've just started to use the idea of genres (Crowston, Orlikowski etc) in explaining to students how they might use web resources. It is not a matter of whether a source was found on the Web or paper that matters, but the type of document that is being presented (peer reviewed, working paper, journalistic, etc). I'm still waiting for the students to submit tehir work, so I don't know if it's made any difference...
Steve
