Will my accepted paper appear in conference proceeding without presentation?

Question

Will generally accepted papers appear in conferences proceeding without presentation? In particular my paper is accepted for this conference. In the conference web site they pointed out: "Accepted and presented papers will be included in the IEEE CPS Proceedings." In its registration page they have told:

Please register your papers before 20 July 2014. It is strictly enforced. If we do not receive your registration by that date, your papers will be moved from the proceedings. Thank you very much.

Does this mean the registered papers definitively will be appeared in the proceeding? Unfortunately there is no contact info on the web site and they do not response emails. I could not attend the conference and I wonder should I pay regitration fee or not?

Answer 1

The IEEE policy on non-presented papers is as follows:

Authors are expected to attend the conference in person to present their papers and share their ideas.

To encourage attendance, IEEE recommends that conferences exclude or limit the distribution of any paper that was not presented at the conference. This policy is not mandatory and only applies to conference proceedings where IEEE is the copyright holder.

If authors are unable to attend the conference and present their papers, they should contact the program chair as soon as possible so that substitute arrangements can be made.

That is, it is at the conference organizer's discretion. Some IEEE conferences do pull a paper from the published proceedings if it isn't presented at the conference: for example, the IEEE Signal Processing Society has the policy that papers not presented will not be distributed on IEEEXplore.

The only way to be sure your paper will appear in the conference proceedings is to confirm with the conference organizer.

Answer 2

In general, at least for the better conferences in the computing and information science research area that I find myself working in, if your paper is accepted and at least one author has registered for the conference, then your paper will be included in the conference proceedings and available in the usual archives (ACMDL/IEEEXplore/DBLP etc.)

I have done this multiple times when I lived in different countries and could not afford to travel to a conference in a far flung location. Sometime ago, I wrote another (very related) answer which might be of further help to you.

However, this may vary for the particular conference that you have a paper in.

Added: (to incorporate Jeff's comment)

In some conferences, an author may not even register. A colleague or otherwise could present your paper for you. Of course, this needs the permission of the organizers.