Proceedings on CD

[Ove Hoegh-Guldberg]

My thoughts exactly.  There are some great advantages to be had from CD
distribution.  I would suggest that people can still purchase the volumes as
they need etc.

Cheers,

Ove

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov
[mailto:owner-coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov]On Behalf Of GJ Gast
Sent: Wednesday, 8 November 2000 1:21 AM
To: coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov
Subject: Proceedings on CD


Dear all,

Ove wrote:
>
> The only problem is that not all people will have access to good web
resources.
> A CD with manuscripts could be burnt that might be offered to those scientists
> who do not have the benefit of fast Internet resources.
>
> Regards,
>
> Ove

I have in Bali coined the idea of printing and distributing the symposium
proceedings on CD. Some advantages I see:

1. Printing costs of the paper version are about US$100,000 plus roughly
US$20 on postage for each. A CD costs less than one dollar and postage is
hardly more than a normal letter. With 1500 participants the paper version
costs 130,000 and the CD version roughly 3000, an almost 98% reduction of
the costs.

2. CD's are now 900 MB, undoubtably larger in 4 years. So a 1000 authors
will have about 1 MB each for their paper. A paper can be written in any
format the author wishes. MS Word obviously, but why not in HTML as a
web page? Colours can be used, tables, graphs, pictures, models,
simulations and data sets as long as it fits the set amount of disk space. If
the articles are burned on 2 CD's every author will have 2 MB. There is no
limit.

3. Lay-out of the papers can be done by the authors, which means a
tremendous reduction of the work load for the symposium proceedings
editor. This allows the publication of the proceedings a few months after the
symposium rather than a few years.

4. In the proceedings of the Bali meeting only 400 papers out of over a 1000
oral contributions will be selected for publications. There is no such reduction
necessary when working with CD's.

5. You can easily share your copy with your students or co-workers by
placing it on the internal network or by simply burning copies.

6. Even in the developing countries computers with CD ROM players are
common now. Everybody can use a CD.

7. If the structure of the CD is written in HTML the whole thing can easily be
made available through a webpage as well.

My two cents. Cheers, GJ.
===============================================
Dr. Gert Jan Gast
Oostelijke Handelskade 31
1019BL Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Phone int 31 (0)20 4198607
Please use <gjgast at freeler.nl> as primary address
for large attachments. My permanent email address is
<gjgast at dds.nl> . Please remove <gjgast at tropicbird.fol.nl>
from your address book. It can't be used web-based and
will stop some time in the future.