Is it unethical for professional societies to offer conference discounts to members?

Question

There is a recurring pattern I see in conferences organized by several professional associations. Two different conference fees are offered, X for members and Y for non-members, with Y>X. Often, the annual membership fee for said professional associations is less than Y-X, so becoming member is cheaper than paying the non-member fee. For example, for different reasons today I have stumbled upon the pages of this, this and this conference.

I can only see two possible reasons for this practice, both ethically dubious:

• to force people to become members, increasing artificially the dimension of the professional association.
• to "move" funds from the conference treasure to the association treasure, leaving them available for a larger number of activities.

Often conference fees are paid by research funds, while membership fees are paid personally by the researchers, so this practice also has unpleasant side-effects on their personal finances.

Questions:

1. Am I overlooking more plausible justifications for this practice? Do you agree with my analysis?
2. How ethical do you find this practice?
3. Should I raise the issue with the professional societies I am a member* of?

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*: You can probably guess the reason why I am a member. :(

Answer 1

Typically the organizations that do this are professional societies. And, as you mentioned, they have many more activities than just running the conference, so having membership fees separate from conference attendance fees allow them greater flexibility to manage their accounts.

Some places allow membership fees to be paid out of institute funds (this depends on the country and the situation, of course). However, many countries also make such professional expenses tax-deductible (after a certain threshold). Obviously it doesn't recoup the full cost of the membership, but it's better than nothing.

However, one additional point to consider is that most such conferences require that at least one of the authors of a presentation to be a member of the society. (Sometimes, this requirement falls on the presenter herself.)

Answer 2

I find this practice 100% ethical. I don't see any argument to the contrary in your question.

Nobody is forcing you to do anything. You don't have to attend any conferences. But conferences cost money, so if you attend then you do have to pay something. Even then, you don't have to become a member. The non-member registration fee is generally not so high as to be prohibitive.

This is no less ethical than your local supermarket distributing coupons. You don't have to shop there and you don't have to use the coupons even if you do. In fact, in the US many supermarket chains offer memberships that give you discounts -- that's not unethical!

As for your second bullet point, in my professional society I know that conferences actually lose money and are subsidized by other sources of society income (mainly journals). I don't know if that is typical.

Answer 3

I think that the question is written from the perspective that the conference is somehow an independent entity from the sponsoring organization. But that feels somewhat ahistorical to me. To have a concrete example, consider a society I am a member of: the Association for Symbolic Logic, founded in 1936. According to their web site,

The Association for Symbolic Logic is an international organization supporting research and critical studies in logic. Its primary function is to provide an effective forum for the presentation, publication, and critical discussion of scholarly work in this area of inquiry.

Of course there are societies much older, and much younger, but presumably each was founded by a group of individuals who agreed that a common organization would help their goals in some way.

The conferences organized by these societies are "meetings" in the genuine (non-academic) sense: they are an arranged time and location for members of the society to gather and confer, like a family reunion. The conferences are arranged by committees from the society, rather than by independent organizers, and the general expectation (and reality) is that the majority of attendees are members of the society.

These conferences are not like a car show where the goal is to draw in a large group of otherwise unknown people. The conferences are usually open to the public (with registration), but the general public is not the main audience - the members are.

This is where the bullet points in the question go astray, in my opinion: they assume that the main goal of the conference is to attract non-members to attend, when in reality the conferences were created to advance the purposes of the society and provide the society members an opportunity to confer and present their work. If an insufficient number of researchers thought that was worth the membership fee, the society and its conferences would disappear.