Chequing out . . .

If you were one of the many thousands turned away from the virtual doors of the Third World-Wide Web conference in Darmstadt, weep no more - but have your Visa card handy.

The organisers have contracted with Dutch publishers Elsevier to market the papers and proceedings of the conference.

Visitors to the conference Web site are asked for their email address and then pointed to the publishers' home page to browse and buy the hard copy version or gain access to the web pages displaying the information.

Previous WWW conferences have offered the information through the Internet for free.

The next WWW conference will be held in Boston from December 11-14 on the theme, the "Web Revolution", and will undoubtedly include a track or two on the commercialisation of academe. The organisers have called for papers.