FAQ: About conference proceedings
What are the differences between conference proceedings and fully edited books?
At Cascadilla Press, we publish three basic types of books containing chapters by different authors: conference proceedings, selected conference proceedings, and fully edited books.
A conference proceedings collects as many papers as possible from a particular conference. Authors may revise their papers in response to comments they received at the conference, but the volume editors do not generally suggest further changes except to ensure that authors follow the formatting requirements. We consider this sort of proceedings to be most appropriate for established conferences which have higher rejection rates for the conference itself, such as BUCLD and WCCFL.
A selected proceedings adds a layer of review organized by the volume editors to ensure that the papers chosen for the proceedings will be of interest to the most readers, and offers authors a chance to complete some revisions to their papers. While a selected proceedings takes longer to put together and involves more work for the volume editors, the resulting book will usually appeal to more readers. We publish selected proceedings for the Second Language Research Forum and the Hispanic Linguistics Symposium.
Both types of conference proceedings contain preliminary versions of papers that may be published later in a much expanded and revised form. In this respect, conference proceedings are similar to research reports and working papers. These all provide a quick and easy way to share research with a broad audience.
Publishing a fully edited book is a much more extensive process where a volume editor decides on a focus for a book, solicits papers and sends them out for peer review, obtains revisions from authors, and chooses the best ones to create a coherent book. The papers are then thoroughly edited by Cascadilla Press and typeset in-house. While a fully edited book may gain its original motivation from a conference, it is very different from a conference proceedings. A fully edited book is similar to a journal -- in both cases, the work goes through both peer review and professional copy editing and is presented in a final polished form.
