As a student in a traditional condensed matter physics group, I was taught for many years that for every conference you visit, you write an article for the proceedings. In my experience it was mainly seen as a gesture to the organizers and to the community. Several times I have responded to the request of organizations like SPIE to contribute a 10-page article to a conference. In later years I was surprised to find out that this attitude toward proceedings is not shared among all researchers. So what is the role of conference proceedings in the present scientific system, should we write them, are they a waste of time, or are they perhaps worse than that?

Why proceedings may be useful
Conference proceedings have fulfilled several useful functions in the past. A conference volume provided a sense of community; by contributing one is acknowledged as an active member of the field. Conference volumes were distributed among the community in hardcopy, in which case they provided reference material for workers in the field. Thus it was an effective way of addressing the relevant people. Proceedings were a way of getting one’s work known in the community before major results were published in a peer reviewed paper. Finally, proceedings can be used to provide background information or to present data which would otherwise not be published elsewhere.

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A scientist should behave as a good citizen in the scientific community. You cannot  expect that other colleagues perform all the unpleasant jobs and that you can spent all your time on science.  I am referring to low-reward activities like reviewing papers, reviewing grant proposals, sitting on review panels, being an editor of a scientific journal, sitting on program committees and – which is the subject of my present post – really organizing a conference.

Conference organizers receive many complaints
Am I a good citizen as far organizing conferences is concerned? I have only organized a dozen one-day meetings, most of them only national. So indeed I am not a very good citizen in this respect. I have been to close to people who did organize large international conference. I can assure you that organization of a 4 or 5-day international conference which a couple of hundred participants is murder. Leave alone conferences for more than thousand people. Those mammoth-sized conferences should be left to professionals.

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