What is the duration between a conference and its online proceedings?

Question

I recently attended an IEEE conference and presented some work. Empirically, how long does it take for my paper to appear online?

On both: live chat and the FAQs, I got the response that it may take several weeks. That is less than useful. What is the average duration in general?

How long does it take for conference proceedings to be loaded in IEEE Xplore?

IEEE publishes more than 1,300 leading-edge conference proceedings in electrical engineering, computer science, and related fields each year. Conference proceedings appear in IEEE Xplore approximately 30 to 60 days following receipt of the content by IEEE. Please note that conference proceedings often arrive at IEEE several weeks after the conference date. To view the status of a conference, download the IEEE Xplore conference proceedings title list (options at bottom of the page).

Answer 1

Depending on the particulars of production on both the conference side and the IEEE side, you should expect anywhere from a few weeks to six months. Both the IEEE and the conference staff can introduce delays here (I was recently publication chair for a conference whose proceedings were delayed by five months by the IEEE simply because they kept dropping the ball).

Note, however, that the IEEE allows authors to put a copy of their own work online. This means that you can make your own work accessible much more quickly, and can often find PDFs of the works other others as well, well before the official version appears in IEEE Xplore.

Answer 2

In my experience, especially with IEEE conferences in India, it usually takes 60 days to 90 days from the date of the conference, very few conferences may unfortunately have delays, but I've not seen it take longer than 6 months.

Pre-print publishing is widely accepted in IEEE and most publishing houses these days, and you can read more about them when submitting the final agreement and submitting the copyright form to IEEE. Details of the policy are outlined here. For specific examples of how to write the preprint/postprint messages, you can check out the footers in the initial and final versions of this ArXiv article.