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