ACM and IEEE Advanced Member Ranks

[Sebastien Bourdeauducq]

On Mon, 2011-07-18 at 15:48 -0400, Gedare Bloom wrote:
> IEEE does more with journals

Which, as far as I know, they sell without paying their authors or
reviewers.

>  Sponsoring conferences
>  reduces attendance fees for both authors and participants, ultimately
>  improving the org's community. 

Something is wrong in the equation. IEEE- or ACM-sponsored conferences
typically have registration fees over 400 Euro, while there are many
other (and even profitable) conferences running in places of similar
standing with fees under 100 Euro. Seeing this, I'm actually wondering
whether those organizations instead do "negative sponsoring" and charge
organizers a fee for publishing the proceedings (on which they would
again charge a fee for reading, of course), letting them put their logo
on the conference's website, and what not. I have done some research
about this on the IEEE website, but could not come to a conclusive
answer.

> including wider dissemination of higher quality research.

Then why does the IEEE insist that papers be copyrighted (and that said
copyright be assigned to them)? If there was no copyright, everyone
could distribute them, leading to actual wider dissemination.