I recently cam across Rick Grush’s Commercial Free Philosophy site, a movement which I am deeply sympathetic to (see below)…I have been dying to read the new paper by Michael Gazzaniga but my school is too cheap to subscribe to Science Direct so I’ll never know what the right level of mind-bran analysis is…but anyways, I noticed that there was no mention of presenting at for-profit conferences. It seems to me that the arguments which support abstaining from publishing in for profit journals would also apply to conferences.
Just as an example, and since this one is coming up, take the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness,
| Late Fees (after Friday 21st of May) | |||
| Student Member | CA $280 | ||
| Member | CA $430 | ||
| Non-member | CA $530 | ||
| Tutorials | CA $60 each | ||
| Conference Dinner | CA $70 | ||
| Accommodation | CA $94/night (or $47 shared) | ||
$500.00 just to present a poster!?!?! On top of the money to fly there and have a room…Horseshit! Similar remarks can be made about the Tucson conferences, the SPP, the apa, and virtually every major conference out there. Now, look, I know that you need to charge something in order to offset the money put into organizing the conference (well, you don’t HAVE to (I didn’t) but I can see why one would think it was fair to do so) but these prices are ridiculous…most of us can’t afford that to present our research. It is true that the University helps offset the price but unless one is at a fancy research institution (hint: most of us aren’t) the help is negligible. So, to go to the apa in Vancouver cost me $2,500 and I got $500.00 from LaGuardia…big help. And for what? To be crammed into a session with three other papers plus commentators and five minutes scheduled for discussion? What a joke!
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