Conference proceedings articles are usually not refereed but are simply collected and edited by the conference organizers. These people do the editorial work to prepare the proceedings volume as a part of the responsibilities they donate to the conference. At the end of this process, the conference organizers typically prepare a camera-ready manuscript, which is sent to a publisher for printing and distribution. Using electronic publishing and access tools, this last step can be completely eliminated. In the process, one eliminates essentially the entire cost to a library of making that proceedings volume available to the clients it serves.
Conference proceedings are an important part of the particle physics literature.
But fewer and fewer libraries are buying proceedings as their per volume costs, paralleling the pattern of scholarly journals, has spiraled upwards. If all scientific conference proceedings were available electronically free of charge, the cost savings in both collection dollars and labor for each individual library would be significant. The element which is needed to make direct distribution of conference proceedings possible in a stable electronic archive that will collect electronically-produced proceedings, index them, permanently archive them, and facilitate access to them over the Web. This is the mission of the eConf archive. The eConf archive makes it possible to locate and download individual conference papers or complete proceedings.