Explanation of Membership Fee Renewals
As you might imagine, our membership and registration fees make up the bulk of the organization's funding and pays for the many conference expenses and for the publishing and distribution of the journals.
The PCA/ACA itself collects the conference registration fees, but Wiley-Blackwell Publishing prints and distributes our journals and collects the organization's membership fees. We do not have control over their membership application or website.
Making clear the membership sign up and renewal timing is a continual issue for us. Conference attendees can, in fact, go ahead and sign up for membership now and the due date for renewal will be one year from date of remittance.
We require, however, renewal of membership every year, before attending the next conference; in this case, if you renew today, the next conference for which you would need to renew your membership would be 2010, because the 2008 conference is past.
Many scholars and enthusiasts attend our national conference year-after-year, and so we try to make sure that membership is paid each year before they attend the annual national conference a second time without having renewed their membership. We hope in this way to afford to keep putting on quality conferences and publishing quality journals, year-after-year.