I think that the community should have been consulted before transitioning to this format.
Well, I suppose we didn’t hold a plebiscite, but there have been many discussions, workshops, surveys, announcements, and invitations to collaborate within the NIME community (to the extent that it can be defined) regarding publication formats. There was a process of trialling pubpub with various folks, both on the 2021 committee and just volunteers from around the community. NIME is a doocracy: the folks that show up and do things tend to end up making the decisions.
PubPub is evidently not perfect, but I think the hope was that it would be at least a good experiment as we keep an eye on other web-first publication technologies (and create them ourselves). It’s disappointing to feel that we are going backwards.
I prefer reading pubpub articles, particularly during the (online) conference and particularly on devices with smaller screens. I really appreciated the timely publication of the 2022 proceedings and the fact that it was indexed quickly.
Clearly there are problems with PDF export for Pubpub which never worked well.
I do see the 2020 template (and earlier) as dated. If we are using a latex template, it would be good to use one that looks a bit more modern. Unfortunately the present ACM template isn’t really appropriate for non-ACM events.
I think I’ve demonstrated with my other posts that it’s possible to use current tools to have both PDF and HTML with non-latex source. If someone wants to pick up that work and get hacking on new solutions, well, the template is CC0…
I guess it would be good to see some efforts here to try to address some of the issues with (pick some) indexing, authoring, reading, accessibility, archiving, DOI minting. By switching back to the old templates, more of these things are kicked down the road to other members of the community.
A few suggestions:
- kill the word template, document a workflow for importing word into Overleaf and the latex template.
- collect all source files from authors (no exceptions) for systematic conversion into an HTML proceedings.