All but the first proceedings have been produced and distributed by IEEE. Since a while all those proceedings are available through IEEE’s digital libraries (IEEExplore and CSDL). As of 2011 CCC no longer has paper proceedings.
Production. When CCC switched to on-line only proceedings, the IEEE charge for producing the proceedings dropped substantially (see Table 1) but remains nontrivial (about 10% of the budget). There are considerably cheaper alternatives, and IEEE allows us to use them. We do need to provide IEEE with electronic copies in the format required for their digital libraries.
Distribution. IEEE demands every conference to include its proceedings in IEEExplore and CSDL, and to transfer copyright to IEEE. Only libraries and individuals who pay the subscrip- tion or download fees have access to the publication. Although not an official policy, according to Paul Beame (former TCMF Chair and current SIGACT Chair) IEEE is OK with conferences having their own web site that happens to contain all the conference papers linked in, provided the conference does not make a big deal about it. The FOCS web site has links that are available via a user name and password.
Alternatives. There are reliable alternatives for producing and distributing proceedings such that authors maintain their copyright, and access is open and free. Two options that I looked into are the following.
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Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs). This is a service offered by Dagstuhl, with long-term guarantees by the German government. STACS publishes their proceedings with LIPIcs. The charge is between 500 and 800 Euro per year.
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Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science (EPTCS). This is an overlay of the Computing Research Repository (CoRR), the CS part of the arXiv, which is run by the Cornell library. So far only smaller workshops and conferences have published their proceedings with EPTCS. There is no charge.
Both options provide ISBN numbers.
Conclusion. While IEEE was instrumental in producing and distributing the CCC proceedings in the past, in the on-line era we no longer need IEEE for that. Appearing in the IEEE digital libraries is still a plus for CCC, but it is offset by the access restrictions. There are good open access alternatives, but it is unclear whether IEEE will allow them for their conferences in the foreseeable future.
Next section: Other Conferences