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> Why I Withdrew an Accepted COMPSAC Paper

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publishing academia cost open access COMPSAC
// The paper was accepted. I withdrew it because I could not justify the registration fee — and that is a structural problem worth naming.

Why I Withdrew an Accepted COMPSAC Paper

"Who Audits the Auditor?" — a blockchain-anchored fraud detection pipeline, F1 = 0.895 — was accepted at IEEE COMPSAC 2026. I withdrew it.

Not because of a flaw. Because of the registration fee.

The arithmetic

IEEE conferences require at least one author to register at full rate for the paper to appear in the proceedings. For a self-funded researcher without travel support, that is a four-figure cost for a single workshop-adjacent publication.

I had four other 2026 papers to bring to camera-ready. The same money covers compute for months of experiments. The paper does not become more true by being in the proceedings.

So it stays where it already is: arXiv:2604.22096, free to read, permanently.

What is actually lost

Honest accounting — withdrawing costs something real:

  • Indexing. IEEE Xplore is where reviewers in this subfield look. arXiv is not.
  • The acceptance signal. Peer review passed. Nothing durable records that.
  • Citations. Proceedings papers get cited more than preprints, regardless of quality.

I do not think "just put it on arXiv" is a complete substitute. It is a compromise, and pretending otherwise helps no one.

Why say it publicly

The convention is to quietly drop the paper and never mention it. That convention makes the cost invisible — it looks like these papers were never written, rather than written, accepted, and priced out.

The publication page for this work says exactly this: accepted, withdrawn, preprint, seeking resubmission. It reads worse than a clean acceptance line. It is also what happened.

If a venue's business model means accepted work does not appear because the author cannot pay, that is a property of the venue worth stating out loud — especially by people for whom it is merely inconvenient rather than disqualifying.

Where it goes

The work is not dead. It is being prepared for a venue whose cost structure I can actually meet. If it lands, the CMS entry flips from preprint back to conference and this post gets a postscript.

Until then it is a preprint, and the number is still 0.895.

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