I am soliciting accounts of incidents similar to the following.
Please send them to walt@cvs.rochester.edu.
A student working with me, Xiaofeng Qi, and I submitted a paper for
the "1994 Symposium on Neurobiology for Young Chinese Scientists," held
21-25 August 1994 in Beijing and sponsored by the Institute of Biophysics
of the Academia Sinica. We received a letter on 30 April 1994, from the
Chairman of the Organizing Committee, Yuncheng Diao, informing us that our
abstract "...had been accepted for oral presentation..." When Xiaofeng
registered for the meeting in Beijing, she found that our paper was not on
the program, and she was not allowed to deliver it. This was policy, not
an error: "Not everyone who had an abstract accepted can present it," she
was informed.
In the other incident, a colleage, Avi Naiman, and I submitted a paper
to the Pacific Graphics '94 (PG94) international meeting, held 26-29 August
1994 in Beijing. We were notified that our paper had been accepted for
oral presentation and publication in the conference proceedings. However,
when Avi arrived in Beijing to register for the meeting, he found that our
paper was not in the PG94 program nor was it published in the PG94 proceed-
ings. Instead, it had been published in the proceedings of a Chinese
conference co-located and co-advertised with PG94: The Fourth International
Conference on Computer-Aided Drafting, Design and Manufacturing Technology
(CADDM94). The meeting to which we had submitted our paper brings together
computer graphics researchers from throughout Asia and beyond, while the
other meeting covers a more narrow topic and is attended by few researchers
from outside China itself. We had not been consulted about nor even
informed of the withdrawal of our paper from the one meeting to which it
had been submitted, nor of its publication in the proceedings of the meet-
ing to which it had not been submitted.
It is hard to draw conclusions on the basis of two such extraordi-
nary events. That is why we are soliciting information on similar experi-
ences, in which papers were first accepted and then the acceptances with-
drawn, or in which papers were accepted for a meeting to which they had not
been submitted, without the knowledge of the authors.
Walter Makous
Center for Visual Science
University of Rochester
Rochester, NY 14627
walt@cvs.rochester.edu