Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Hat trick - the long wait

Workshop proceedings are usually published right before the event, and it was a little disappointing to find that EKAW'91 changed course last minute. The proceedings were to be published in Springer's Lecture Notes in AI, but it was decided to postpone publication until after the event, to allow participants to include some of the discussion from the workshop into their papers. Being inexperienced and somewhat naive, I believed every word of the explanation.

Editorial handouts were to be handed out during the workshop in Crieff, but in the end, it was decided to send these through email. Things were getting smelly when I heard a rumour that all submissions had been accepted for publication. This usually means the workshop has a lower status, as well as the resulting proceedings. The only thing that gave me hope, was the fact that the volume would be published in LNAI, which does have a certain status.

The rest was silence. The anticipated editorial notes were never sent, the EKAW'91 organizers did not respond to my emails, and the proceedings did not happen. 

It must have been about one year later when the news spread that there would never be a publication in LNAI. There was no contract with Springer, there had never been a contract and there would never be a contract: a fraud in the organizing committee had been lying about it for more than a year. Another member of the committee took his responsibility and published the volume as a GMD report, which is better than nothing, but it lacks the status of an LNAI volume. So, there it is, my first official publication:
Langevelde, I.A. van and Treur J,  Logical methods in protocol analysis; In: Linster, M and Gaines, B.R. (eds.) Proc. of the European Knowledge Acquisition Workshop - EKAW'91 (GMD Studien Nr. 211), September 1992.
With EKAW'91 I realized for the first time that science is not populated exclusively with knights of truth and reason...

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