I got a paper accepted to the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) a couple of months ago. A great honor…
I'd link to the paper, but I was forced to sign over my copyright and enjoined from displaying the paper on my web page until it appears in the printed conference proceedings. The work it describes, at any rate, is my BMPF work hosted at BartForge.
For the paper to appear in the printed proceedings, I am required to sign up for a full conference registration and go present. I just found out today what that will set me back. $900.
Keep in mind that the proceedings themselves are not free; IEEE is selling the 2007 proceedings in four volumes at $35 each, for a grand total of $140 a copy.
According to my acceptance notice, there were 1352 acceptances to this conference out of 2729 submissions. That's crazy. One might suspect that they just phoned the thing in. And indeed, my 3-referee "peer review" for the paper was one line each from two of the referees, one of which was "interesting problem".
1352 × $900 = $1,216,800. Holy heck. Even assuming that not everyone is as generous as I am, and that the costs for running the event are around $500K, that's around $500K in the bank for this event. Thank goodness for non-profit professional societies.
Sadly, I'm not going to withdraw the paper. It's a good idea, and I feel like I've committed to presenting it.
However, I'm done. Anybody expecting to get a paper submission from me from now on had better be prepared to allow me to retain the copyright; allow me to freely reproduce the paper for non-commercial purposes; give me a proper paper review; and expect no more than a nominal registration fee (less than $200, for sure).
The better grade of conferences (e.g. Usenix Annual Technical Conference) will give speakers free registration. This seems much more reasonable to me—and would reduce the pressure to accept an absurd number of papers.
I'm tenured now, so I won't lose my job over not publishing. And I'm not rich enough or vain enough to continue to support the vanity press business. (B)