CEUR-WS.org
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Publishing at CEUR-WS.org (valid till 2019-07-31)

Note: From 2019-08-01 onwards, we have switched to the CC-BY licensing model. Proceedings editors then need to follow the rules as layed out in the new HOWTOSUBMIT document!

This document is addressed to organizers of scientific workshops/conferences who are interested in distributing their proceedings via the Internet. CEUR-WS.org focusses on the disciplines of computer science, information systems, and information technology. Please read this document carefully to avoid unnecessary delays.

Policy at CEUR-WS.org

Benefits at CEUR-WS.org

We invite organizers of scientific workshops/conferences to use the WWW site CEUR-WS.org physically located at SunSITE.Informatik.RWTH-Aachen.DE/Publications/CEUR-WS as a medium to publish their proceedings. The service is part of the activities under the umbrella of SunSITE Central Europe. The goal of CEUR-WS.org is promoting information exchange within the academic community. We aim at a high-quality service with the following characteristics:

Proceedings published on CEUR-WS.org are freely accessible on the SunSITE. Hence, there are no technical provisions (access authorization) to prevent un-authorized use of the proceedings contents. Being freely accessible does not mean 'public domain', however. All material remains copyrighted.

Preconditions for publishing at CEUR-WS.org

We do not formally evaluate the scientific quality of submitted volumes but expect that this is guaranteed by the editors who submit the proceedings volume. There are a few formal rules that your submission should fulfill (updated 2017-12-18):
  1. Peer review by program committee: Proceedings papers must be peer-reviewed by a program committee of scholars. Invited papers may be included without being peer-reviewed, provided that the majority of papers in the proceedings are not invited papers. The members of the program committee and the rules for paper selection must be publicly announced, e.g. on the web page of the conference/workshop and/or in the preface of the proceedings.
  2. Minimum size: There shall be at least six papers in a submitted volume. The minimum length of a regular paper should be five pages (counting cf. LNCS format). Invited papers can have less pages. The whole proceedings volume should have at least 40 pages excluding frontmatter. Since page counts depend on the page layout, we calculate with around 2500 characters per page (=380-400 words per page).
    We distinguish regular papers (at least 10 LNCS-equivalent pages) and short papers (5-9 LNCS-equivalent pages). See here for details. The index file shall use appropriate tags such as session names or tags behind the paper title to qualify the type of non-regular papers.
  3. Open submission: Submission of papers to the workshop/conference should be open. For example, it should not be restricted to members of a certain project.
  4. Academic editor: There is at least one person with a PhD in the list of editors. This person gives her good name for the quality of the submission.
  5. Consistent paper set: A proceedings volume shall not be or stay published at CEUR-WS.org, if there is another proceedings publication for the same event (identified by its title plus year) but with a different set of papers.
  6. Physical location: The workshop/conference must take place physically at one location for the usual duration of such an event. We do not publish proceedings for virtual and on-line conferences.
  7. Use of English: The majority of the papers in a proceedings volume shall be in English. For papers written in a language different to English follow these instructions.
  8. Focus on computer science and wide audience: The CEUR-WS.org publishing service is a venue to publish proceedings of the workshop and conferences, where the main topic is related to computer science (incl. information systems and IT). Due to a large number of submissions that are not directly related to computer science or that target mostly a national audience, we reserve the right to ask the editors to provide us with the list of the DBLP listing of each author and/or PC member, and provide us with the average number of peer-reviewed DBLP listed papers per author. If that number is too low (for example, less than 5), you should publish at a different publication venue. Note that you should not include ArXiv and other non peer-reviewed papers in your DBLP listing. Doctoral consortiums affiliated to well-known conferences are exempted from the rule on DBLP listed papers, but in such cases the program committee members should have a good representation in DBLP.
Doctoral consortiums also form an exception to the open submission rule in the following sense: If your volume would violate the "minimum size" constraint, then consider to form a joint submission with another workshop that was held at the same event (same place, same time): See Vol-1185 for an example. In such cases, the organizers of the joint workshops are typically the editors of the joint submission and one of them should perform the procedure PUT (see below). Joint proceedings of workshops that took place at different events cannot be published with CEUR-WS.org.

CEUR-WS.org is a publication channel for workshops and conferences from the computer science and information systems domain. We may publish proceedings from neighbor disciplines if they have a significant overlap with computer science and/or information systems. The workshop/conference should have a clear focus on specific scientific topics.

We are quite strict on the preconditions and want to avoid unnecessary rejections. Since we check the constraints after the submission, you should be careful with promises to your authors that the proceedings will be published with CEUR-WS.org. However, if you follow the guilines of this document, you can be rather sure that your request shall be accepted. You may include a phrase like "Proceedings shall be submitted to CEUR-WS.org for online publication" in the Call for Papers of your workshop/conference and on your website. Please do not use the CEUR-WS logo on your website.

Papers written in a language different than English

The majority (50% or more) of the paper in a volume must be in English. English is the de facto standard when you want to target an international audience. In general, the submitted papers have to be written in the Latin alphabet. If you want to publish a proceedings in a non-Latin alphabet, you should first contact us to see whether we can find an acceptable presentation. See also our guidelines on non-Latin titles.

If you submit papers written in a language different to English, we must be able to verify the scientific character of the papers. Therefore, for papers written in a language different than English, we require that you provide an English translation of the paper titles in the index file and additional English abstracts in the papers (see Vol-1877 as example). This is not just to be able to verify the scientific character of a paper, but also to make the content of these papers accessible to the international scientific community. An English abstract and title allows any scientist to decide whether the contribution of a paper is relevant to his or her research. If interested, he or she then may contact the authors for more information.

How to publish

A crucial thing in publishing is to know who is the publisher! In CEUR-WS.org, you as proceedings editor are also the publisher. You submit the material to our server (see procedure PUT below) and you can remove it (procedure DELETE). We just provide you with the publication tool, i.e., the WWW server of SunSITE.Informatik.RWTH-Aachen.DE. You do not need to ask for permission from us to submit your proceedings. We typically get aware of a new submission when it is uploaded (procedure PUT). By default, we do not acquire any rights or responsibilities for the publication. You, the proceedings editor, are responsible for having acquired the non-exclusive right for electronic publication for all published material (papers, images, etc.) from the copyright owners, in particular the papers' authors. See this copyright transfer form for an example on how to collect rights from authors (adapted from a template kindly provided by Pedro J. Molina under GNU Copyleft licence). You can adapt it to your needs or create your own form. In any case, CEUR-WS.org is not keeping track of this part of your proceedings preparation. Make sure that the specific copyright transfer form that you use complies with the CEUR-WS.org author and editor rights.

The standard phrase defining the rights for readers of individual papers displayed in the index file of a proceedings volume is

"Copyright © XXXX for the individual papers by the papers' authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes. This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors."
where XXXX is the year in which the papers were produced - typically the same year in which the workshop/conference took place. The copyright phrase tells readers of your proceedings volumes the conditions under which they can download individual papers (resp. material contained in your volume). Make sure that the rights you obtained from the paper authors are compatible with this phrase! Specifically, the PDFs of the papers in your proceedings may not include a phrase that transfers the author copyright to another organization such as ACM/IEEE, who typically acquire exclusive copyright transfers. Also avoid copyright clauses that have a meaning that differs from the above phrase. The default rule for the copyright (i.e. when the papers have no copyright footnote) is that the authors hold the copyright. In case of violation, they can use the copyright law to defend their rights. Hence, leaving out the copyright clause does not restrict authors' rights. The contrary is true. If you nevertheless prefer to have a copyright footnote included in the PDFs, then let your authors use a simple text like:
"Copyright © XXXX for this paper by its authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes."
or even simpler
"Copyright held by the author(s)."
Since we plan to transition to a Creative Commons license model, you may also use a clause like
"Copyright held by the author(s). Use permitted under the CC-BY license CreativeCommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
All papers in a submission shall have the same copyright clause. Be aware that CEUR-WS.org has no obligation to track copyrights violators. We, i.e. the management team of CEUR-WS.org and the editorial board of Sun SITE Central Europe, take no responsibility for any damage caused by the publication of your proceedings volume. See disclaimer for more details. You are the publisher of your own proceedings volume, CEUR-WS.org is a service that provides an online proceedings store for you.

Formally, the management team of CEUR-WS.org and the editorial board of Sun SITE Central Europe is not obliged to provide any submitted material on the server or to guarantee a certain quality of service. In practice however, we are willing to provide this service for a virtually unlimited time. The published material must be scientific or serve academic purposes. It may not contain indecent parts or parts violating human rights. Advertisements (including logos of sponsor companies) must be avoided. Better put them on the home page of your workshop/conference and/or give them credits in the foreword/preface of the the proceedings (if applicable).

A. Prepare the submission file

Before the PUT step, you prepare a submission directory containing all material to be published. This directory must contain at least a file named "index.html" which serves as the entry point to your material. The entry point "index.html" to your material must conform to the master layout Vol-XXX/index.html (Vol-AIXIA/index.html for the AI*IA Series). In particular, you are supposed to use the "CEUR" class tags as advised in the master layout. Do not open Vol-XXX/index.html and then say "File→Save As" in your browser, as this may mutilate the file, but instead right-click on a link to Vol-XXX/index.html and say "Save As". You may also use a download tool such as wget or curl (e.g. execute the command line wget http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-XXX/index.html).

You may want to require your authors to use a uniform style for the papers. See Vol-XXX/samplestyles for some examples. We encourage to use one of these styles because they will include in each paper a reference back to the proceedings volume where they appeared.

If you collected the papers via EasyChair and/or would like to embed RDFa annotations for semantic search engines into index.html with little effort, you can use the GPL-licensed script collection ceur-make. The scripts, tested under Linux so far, automate generation of the index.html file, the copyright form for authors, and a BibTeX database for your volume. We strongly discourage manual RDFa editing without using ceur-make, e.g. by copying from an old volume, as it is error-prone. If you really know what you are doing, see our recommendations for validating RDFa below.

We impose certain preconditions, in particular on the minimum size of a proceedings volume. Make sure your submissions fulfills the preconditions. We kindly ask you to include in your submission file a document that lists the members of the program committee, and specifies how many papers were submitted/accepted. You can include this information in a preface document, as usually done for printed proceedings.

View the index file as plain Unicode text rather than as HTML code. Your file index.html must at least contain the title of the material and the names/addresses of the editors (normally identical to the publishers). It must use the style sheet http://ceur-ws.org/ceur-ws.css which defines some common layout for proceedings volumes. It may not contain or start executable code such as Java, JavaScript, ActiveX or any other type of executable code. Neither may it contain cookie definitions nor invisible pixels and the like.

HTML Validation

You can check the consistency/completeness of the submission directory by accessing it locally with your Web browser, and we require you to validate it using the W3C Validator. If you use RDFa tags, we ask you to validate your RDFa by using the W3C RDFa parser.

We also recommend that you check any links in your file. For example, if you have temporarily uploaded your file to your own homepage (from which it should be removed once published with us!), you can feed its URL into the W3C link validator.

Plain text editor

Do not use a Web page editor to produce index.html but rather a simple text editor like 'vi' or 'notepad'. Web page editors including Microsoft Word tend to produce unreadable HTML code which we want to avoid in CEUR-WS.org. CSS must be preferred over FONT tag. As of 2015, we accept characters beyond the 7-bit US-ASCII character set; however, the index.html file must be encoded as UTF-8 Unicode. Also, non-Latin titles need to be accompanied with a Latin transliteration as explained below; non-Latin names must be transliterated.

Please be careful in the preparation of the file index.html. Delays in publishing a volume are mostly due to errors in that file. The management of CEUR-WS.org reserves the right for adapting the file index.html to accommodate the common style of CEUR-WS.org and to include volume numbers and similar meta information.

Rules for papers in the proceedings

You may want to use filenames like "paper1.pdf" for regular papers and "short1.pdf" for short papers. This is not a hard rule, however. Further material like bibliography file, author index, etc. can be included and linked in the index file but is never a paper. We no longer allow including a PDF of the "whole proceedings" since this can easily lead to inconsistencies and blows up the storage space. If you really want to distribute such a redundant PDF, then do so via your workshop/conference home page. You may include a link to that PDF in the index file.

The papers must be original, i.e. not published in an earlier workshop or conference or journal!

The papers in the proceedings should be in Portable Document Format (PDF). Prefer neutral filenames like paper1.pdf over content-carrying filenames like SmithAndWagon.pdf. Strictly use ISO-compliant filenames and directory names! For example, ISO does not allow blanks in a filename like in "paper 1.pdf". Each paper shall correspond to single file in the volume.

Author/editor affiliations

The authors in the paper PDFs should give meaningful affiliations, which typically include the author's organization and country. A similar rule holds for the editors of the proceedings volume. The information shall allow readers to establish a contact. A few regions in the world have a disputed legal status. We welcome submissions also from such regions but their affiliation should then by default use the United Nations standard reference for the region. In some cases, an ambiguous reference, e.g. just the region name, may be used in agreement with the CEUR-WS.org editor. CEUR-WS.org adopts a conservative (i.e. like United Nations) position about the legal status. We may refuse to publish a submission if no agreement about representing the affiliation can be reached.

Local vs. absolute links

The links in "index.html" to the published material must be local, e.g.
  HREF="paper1.pdf"
rather than absolute
  HREF="http://www.dept.org/paper1.pdf".

Paper files and other items must be put in the main directory rather than sub-directories of the submission directory. This allows short URLs to the citable items of a published proceedings volume. An exception to this general rule are back links to workshop/conference home pages and home pages of scientific institutions (or research labs) organizing the workshop/conference. Moreover, back links to editor and author home pages are welcome. Please note however that such absolute links can and will become dangling when people change their affiliation! That's also a reason why putting the proceedings online at CEUR-WS.org is probably a better idea than putting it on your home page.

We advise proceedings editors to include a link to their workshop/conference web page in their index file of their CEUR-WS volume. This allows readers to easily locate further information about the workshop/conference such as the call for papers. We also recommend to include a back link from the workshop/conference page to the CEUR-WS volume.

Hints for Mac OS X users

The operating system Mac OS X uses case-insensitive file names. For example, a file name "PaperX.pdf" is equivalent to "paperx.pdf" on Mac-OS X. However, the CEUR-WS.org web site uses case-sensitive file names! Hence, make sure that the files names in your directory have the same capitalization as the URL links to them in your file index.html. The Mac OS X system apparently uses cryptic directories like ".DS_Store" or "__MACOSX". Please make sure that you do not include them in your submission file! Do not use the Mac ZIP utitily for producing the submission file.

How to deal with page numbers

In many cases, authors are interested that a published proceedings volume contains information about number of pages of their paper. Such data is typically used for evaluating the research output of academic staff. It can also be used to indicate the length of an article in a reference. While CEUR-WS.org does not require you to supply such data, you might be interested in how to deal with this.

Most volumes in CEUR-WS.org have no data about page numbers. So, providing them is an extra service. We have no specific knowledge about suitable tools to change page numbers or merge multiple pdf files into a single one. You might want to try Pdftk, Adobe Acrobat or CutePdf.

If you want to merge several pdf files into one and create a table of contents for the merged document, you may want to use the LaTeX macro definitions by Daniel A. Sadilek, originally used for producing the aggregated proccedings file Vol-324/dsml08.pdf. Sample LaTeX styles with and without page numbers are provided at Vol-XXX/samplestyles.

Title capitalization

The titles of papers should be either all use the emphasizing capitalized style or they should all use the regular English (or native language) style. It does not make a good impression if you or your authors mix the styles. Consider the following two titles
  1. Preparing the submission file
    Ken Bar, Anne Foé
  2. Filling a PUT-FORM by Autocompletion
    Mary Doe, Peter Müstermann
The first title uses the regular capitalization of English whereas the second shows the emphasizing style. Both are possible but you should decide on which one you want to consistently apply to your proceedings volume. Some hints on correctly emphasizing titles in English are available at MusicBrainz. It would be great if the paper titles in the index uses the some capitalization as in the paper itself. This would require you to tell your authors what you expect before they submit the final version of the paper. In practice, this soft rule is frequently violated. The correct titles for the above example in emphazizing style would be:
  1. Preparing the Submission File
    Ken Bar, Anne Foé
  2. Filling a PUT-FORM by Autocompletion
    Mary Doe, Peter Müstermann

Non-Latin titles and names

index.html is required to be encoded as UTF-8 Unicode, which, in principle, enables you to use non-Latin scripts. However, in the case that you have non-Latin paper titles, we require that you additionally provide a Latin transliteration. Inside the machine-readable metadata (i.e. the CEURTITLE and AUXTITLE fields), there must be a Latin transliteration. It is strongly recommended to keep the non-Latin original text outside of these machine-readable tags.

For compatibility with publication databases, non-Latin author names must be transliterated into Latin. If an author already has an entry in a widely known publication database such as DBLP, it is strongly preferred to use the same transliteration that is also used there. If you think you are transliterating an author's name for the first time, it is strongly preferred to use a transliteration that is aligned with the English pronunciation, e.g. the BGN/PCGN romanization for Russian.

Creating the submission file

As soon as your submission directory is ready you should pack it into a single submission file. The submission file should be prepared by the UNIX command
 zip -r sub_file.zip dir_name
where "sub_file.zip" is the name of the submission file and "dir_name" is the name of the submission directory. For example, the command
 zip -r  ABCD12.zip ABCD12
creates a submission file for the material contained in the directory ABCD12. Use meaningful names for the submission file, e.g. the acronym of the workshop/conference. Under Windows, you can use packers like WinZIP, PKZIP or similar to produce the submission file. But beware: use ISO-standard file names! In particular, blank characters in file names are not allowed. Under Unix, you may also use the 'tar/gzip' commands to create the submission directory. Make sure that the submission file expands to a directory and not to files in the current directory. Subsequently, the procedures PUT (submit a proceedings volume to be published on CEUR-WS.org) and DELETE (remove a published volume) are explained. These two procedures shall be executed by one of the proceedings editors., i.e. by you. You should in particular sign the corresponding form, and you should be the person mentioned in the clause "submitted by ..." at the end of the index file of the volume. If you are one of the editors but the technical upload is done by a person who is not one of the editors, then you should use the clause "submitted by your name, other name" in the index file.

B. Upload (Procedure PUT)

  1. Make sure that you obtained from the authors the non-exclusive right to publish the material you are going to submit. Keep the signed copyrights transfers of your authors at a safe place in your premises.
  2. Check that you avoided the most-frequent mistakes.
  3. Read the legal disclaimer of Sun SITE. Also read our rules on the limited persistency of volumes published at CEUR-WS.org. If you don't agree then do not proceed.
  4. Share the submission file with your authors to give them a last chance to identify errors. Give them sufficient time (a few days) to report errors. We do not monitor this step but assume that you take care of it.
  5. Print the PUT FORM, read it carefully, fill it out, and sign it physically (why?) with a pen on paper. The signature must be by an editor of the proceedings listed as editor in the index file! Make a scan of the signed PUT-FORM (format pdf or jpg); name the scanned file PUT-FORM-ABCD12.pdf (.jpg), where ABCD12 is the acronym of your workshop/conference. Kindly check that the scanned file does not exceed approx. 500 KB.
  6. Put the submission file and the PUT-FORM in a temporary folder on a web/ftp server of your organization (or a public folder of a cloud provider) and send us the URL of that folder via email. Do not use the "sharing" function of cloud services but rather create a public link for us.

Use proper ISO-compliant document names (no blanks in the file names) for the submission file like ABCD12.zip and PUT-FORM-ABCD12.pdf for the scanned PUT-FORM. ZIP format is preferred for the submission file.

The PUT-FORM indicates to us that you are aware of copyright issues. If the material is accepted by us you will receive a notification with the bibliographic reference of the material. Please be reachable via email the days following the upload of the submission file. We might have some questions or we may have to ask you to correct certain issues.

Assignment of volume numbers

Our preferred procedure is that we assign the next free volume number to your proceedings as soon as you upload the submission file and send the accompanying PUT FORM. This is a mature procedure and creates least work on our side.

Still, some proceedings editors would like to get a CEUR-WS volume number assigned to their workshop/conference in advance to the publication at CEUR-WS, for example to to include the URL of the proceedings volume in the frontmatter of the proceedings. To do so, just contact the manager of this site via email (see end of this page) and specify a deadline within 4 weeks after the request until when the proceedings volume will be uploaded. It is not a requirement to ask in advance for a volume number. Neither do we recommend to ask for a volume number in advance. If you have received an advance volume number, we expect that the submission will arrive before the promised deadline, and that you very strictly follow the instructions for submission. Note that the assignment of a volume number is not a guarantee that your volume gets published at CEUR-WS.org. Your submission must still fulfill the preconditions.

C. Procedure DELETE

You may remove your proceedings from our server at any time, even without telling us the reason. A reason could be that you want to publish the proceedings as a book and the publisher requests exclusive copyright for that. Note: this holds for proceedings editors but not for authors of individual papers. We will not remove individual papers from published proceedings. Only complete volumes can be removed. You should make the authors of papers aware of this rule.
  1. Print the DELETE FORM, fill it out, sign it, and upload a scanned copy of the signed DELETE-FORM to our upload site; you may alternatively send the hardcopy of the DELETE-FORM to the address specified on it.
CEUR-WS.org is only responsible for removing the specified proceedings volume from its own site. Copies of the volume published elsewhere are outside the scope of CEUR-WS.org and will not be removed upon reception of a DELETE-FORM! This is true in particular for services which scan the Web for online papers and make copies of the papers available in their own site. Examples of such services are Citeseer and scholar.google.com. CEUR-WS.org has no legal relationship with any such organization. We neither authorize nor track their activities wrt. papers published on CEUR-WS.org.

The actual date of execution of PUT/DELETE is subject to local policy of the management of CEUR-WS.org and SunSITE.Informatik.RWTH-Aachen.DE. Once deleted, a volume cannot be re-published at CEUR-WS.org.

How to correct errors in an already published volume

First of all, be very careful in preparing the submission file in order to avoid errors! Ask a colleague to double-check, i.e. that all paper files are included with the correct file names and that all author names and paper titles are correct. As a rule of thumb, we will reject requests to update an already published volume! There are only three exceptions:
  1. Papers can be corrected within two working days after the publication of the proceedings at CEUR-WS.org. Only corrections of typographic errors in the bibliographic elements (author names, title, affiliation) are allowed. Providing improved paper versions is not allowed even if the original version was included due to a human error!
  2. Forgotten papers can be included within two working days if they were referenced in the original index.html file.
  3. Typographic errors in the file index.html can be corrected within two working days after the publication at CEUR-WS.org.

The deadlines are very tight. Hence, you must check the correctness of the files before submitting them to us! Include the authors in the correctness check by letting them confirm that the right version of their paper is included. You cannot change them after submission!

Individual published papers cannot be removed from a volume. Only the editor can remove the whole volume (procedure DELETE above). To submit the corrected version, please proceed as follows:

  1. Create a new index.html file that is identical to the one currently on the server. Do not edit your old index.html file since it differs from the one that is on-line. The easiest way to create the identical file is to copy the source code of the file that is currently on-line (to do that press "View Page Source" or similar option on your web browser. Once you can see the source code, select all and then copy it to your new index.html file). Do not just download the file since that usually changes links.
  2. Edit the index.html file
  3. Create a simple text file changes-currentdate.txt, where currentdate is the current date (e.g. 2010-03-21), and in which you list all the changes you made, e.g.:
    corrected title of paper 3
    corrected name of author of paper 7
    corrected link pointing to the affiliation of the first editor
    
  4. Afterwards, create a zip archive Corrections-Vol-XXX.zip containing the files index.html, changes-[currentdate].txt, and possibly new paper versions (see above). To create a zip archive use the procedure described above.
  5. Send us your corrections in the same way as you uploaded the submission file in procedure PUT: Put the file Corrections-Vol-XXX.zip (XXX to be replaced by your volume number) in a temporary folder on a web/ftp server of your organization (or a public folder of a cloud provider) and send us the URL of that folder via email.
Corrections can only be requested by proceedings editors, not by authors of individual papers. Implementing corrections puts an extra burden on us. We provide this service in our spare time and get not paid for it. So, please take great care in removing errors before uploading the volume to CEUR-WS.org.

Top errors in submissions

The following simple mistakes occur in many submissions. Please check that your submission does not repeat them!
  1. Submissions using an outdated template for the index file.
    Always use the latest template http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-XXX/index.html!
  2. Papers with incompatible copyright clauses.
    This occurs when your authors use an unedited format file that assigns the copyright to another publisher, or uses a copyright clause that is too different from the standard CEUR-WS.org copyright clause.
  3. Inconsistent title capitalization.
    Use the same rule for title capitalization for all papers listed in your index file!
  4. Index file contains HTML errors.
    Check your index file with the validators before you submit your files!
  5. Incomplete or incorrect paper data.
    Do not use author names with abbreviated given names such as "S. Writer". Always provide full author names like "Sarah Writer". Check the author name spelling with services like DBLP, if applicable. Also check the author names and paper title in the index file against the paper PDF.
  6. False LI tags.
    Make sure that the LI tags must carry an ID tag that has a label identical to the filename without file extension, e.g.
    <li id="paper01"><a href="paper01.pdf">
  7. Redundant PDF files.
    We no longer support the inclusion of redundant "full pdfs" for the whole proceedings. However, you can add a link to a zip of complete proceedings that we store on our server:
    <a href="ftp://SunSITE.Informatik.RWTH-Aachen.DE/pub/publications/CEUR-WS/Vol-XXX-v1.zip">Complete proceedings in one ZIP file</a>
  8. False paper classification.
    Some submissions use CEURTITLE/CEURAUTHOR tags for single-page abstracts of invited papers that are not citable papers. Use AUXTITLE/AUXAUTHOR tags for such papers.
The contact editor (the person who submitted the proceedings and signed the PUT-FORM) should be reachable via Email in the first couple of days after the submission to clarify issues with the submission.

Ethical issues

We assume that you, the proceedings editors, are fully aware of the copyright requirements as discussed further above in this document and have acquired the copyright from the authors of the papers/material published in your volume.

Under rare circumstances, it can happen that already published papers later turn out to be plagiated. We have a procedure to handle this and ask you to follow the corresponding rules in case that you become aware of such a case.

The papers and volumes published on CEUR-WS.org are freely accessible for academic and private use. Only such use is permitted!

Since authors retain their copyright, they are legally allowed to re-publish their paper with a second publisher. While this appears lawful, it could be regarded as self-plagiarism. We strongly discourage such re-publication of papers that are already published with us. Making a copy of the paper available on the author's home page or on the institutional repository is not regarded as a re-publication. In such cases, authors should include a reference/URL to the original publication.

Re-publication vs. mirroring

Being freely accessible on the Internet does not imply an automatic right to re-publish/re-package CEUR-WS.org proceedings volumes (or parts of them) without authorization. Normally, only the proceedings editors have the right to re-publish their proceedings elsewhere, e.g. with a publisher or via a Web site. There are however unwritten rules for academic publishing that usually prohibit re-publications. The same paper should not be published twice, unless there are special circumstances such as re-publishing highly influential papers after a long time. Another reason could be that CEUR-WS ceases to exist (not to be expected any soon!).

When proceedings editors decide to re-publish their CEUR-WS.org volume elsewhere, they should make sure that the re-published version is clearly distinguishible from the CEUR-WS.org version. In particular, it may not use any of the following attributes characteristic to CEUR-WS.org:

Some proceedings editors want to distribute their proceedings via additional publication channels (e.g. printed copies or stored on electronic media or published on the workshop/conference web site) in parallel to the online version at CEUR-WS.org. This is fine with us as long as you (the proceedings editors) clearly distinguish it from the CEUR-WS version like indicated above for the case of re-publications. The re-published volume must then include a phrase like

Originally published online by CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org, ISSN 1613-0073)
or similar on one of the introductory pages of proceedings volume published via the other channel. Such duplicate channels are sometimes convenient but be aware that it is potentially detrimental to the authenticity of your volume. The readers may get confused about where the volume was originally published.

Commercial and non-commercial publishers interested in re-publishing complete proceedings volumes or individual papers are advised to negotiate terms with the editors of the respective volume and/or the authors of the respective papers. CEUR-WS.org is not holding the copyright to the volumes or the individual papers. Hence, we are not a party in such negotiations. The only constraint from our side is that the re-publication is clearly distinguishable from the version published at CEUR-WS.org (see above). Since the CEUR-WS version of the paper is usually the original one, the re-published copy shall include a back reference to the original publication like

Originally published in A. Smith, B. Miller (eds.): Proceedings "Title", CEUR-WS.org/Vol-XXX

CEUR-WS.org is not a re-publisher of already published proceedings or papers. If your proceedings have already been published elsewhere, then do not submit those proceedings to CEUR-WS.org. This rule applies when the proceedings were published with another recognized academic publisher, typically holding an ISSN or ISBN number.

We forbid third-party mirroring of the CEUR-WS.org web site or its parts. Mirroring is different from re-publication since it publishes a one-to-one copy via another Web site. An unauthorized mirror would likely violate the copyright of the CEUR-WS.org Team to its own contents and negatively affect the authenticity of CEUR-WS.org.

Like mirroring, we also disallow to integrate CEUR-WS.org or its parts as an inner frame inside another web site. While this is technically not an act of copying, it can give the impression as if the content of CEUR-WS.org were part of the other web site.

Author and editor rights

Authors of individual papers keep the copyright to their papers. Authors pass publication rights to the respective editors of the CEUR-WS.org volume. This is a non-exclusive right to publish the author's paper. By doing so, authors can of course no longer publish their papers with another publisher who demands the transfer of the exclusive copyright! This would violate the earlier transfer of non-exclusive copyrights to the proceedings editors.

Authors keep the right to publish a copy of the published original of their paper on their home page or via the institutional repository of their organization or via comparable repositories. The paper may also be publicly available via such sites. We kindly ask authors to specify in such cases the bibliographic details of the original publication of the paper at CEUR-WS.org. See below for example on how to reference the paper's bibliographic details.

Likewise, the author has the right to publish a pre-print or post-print of his CEUR-WS.org paper on his homepage, an institutional repository, or elsewhere. We do however not recommend to publish pre-prints when the official version is already online at CEUR-WS.org because it diminishes the authenticity of the paper.

The editors confirm to us in the signed PUT-FORM that the authors continue to hold the copyright to their papers.

CEUR-WS.org acquires no rights to the papers in a proceedings volume, or to the volume as a whole. The editors of the volume hold the right to publish the complete volume. The editors execute this right by publishing the volume on CEUR-WS.org. They are the self-publishers of their volumes. Authors do not have the right to demand the removal or update of their paper published at CEUR-WS.org. Any communication of authors about their papers must instead be directed to the editors of their proceedings volume.

How to reference papers published via CEUR-WS.org

A paper in a CEUR-WS.org volume should be referenced using its online URL, for example
   M. Lenzerini: Description logics for schema level reasoning in databases.
   Proc. of 1st Workshop KRDB'94, Saarbrücken, Germany, September 20-22, 1994,
   CEUR-WS.org, online CEUR-WS.org/Vol-1/lenzerini.pdf.

Use CEUR-WS.org as 'publisher' for the paper even though the respective volume is legally published by its editors. A shorter form for citing a paper can be:
   M. Lenzerini: Description logics for schema level reasoning in databases.
   Proc. of 1st Workshop KRDB'94, Saarbrücken, Germany, September 20-22, 1994,
   CEUR-WS.org/Vol-1/lenzerini.pdf.

A whole proceedings volume can be referenced by its ONLINE URL as follows:
   Enrico Franconi, Michael Kifer (eds.): Knowledge Representation meets Databases 1999.
   Proc. 6th Intl. Workshop KRDB'99, Linköping, Sweden, July 29-30, 1999,
   CEUR-WS.org, online CEUR-WS.org/Vol-21.
We also assign a persistent identifier (URN) to proceedings volumes published at CEUR-WS.org. You can use the URN instead of the ONLINE URL like shown in this example:
   Massimo Melucci, Stefano Mizzaro, Gabriella Pasi (eds.): Italian Information Retrieval Workshop 2010.
   Proceedings of the First Italian Information Retrieval Workshop (IIR-2010), Padua, Italy,
   January 27-28, 2010, CEUR-WS.org/Vol-560, urn:nbn:de:0074-560-7.

We will continue to assign ONLINE URLs to new volumes. The URN is an additional identification scheme. The URN of a published volume can be mapped to its online location via a URN resolver. For example, https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0074-560-7 is resolved to CEUR-WS.org/Vol-560. The physical URL http://SunSITE.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS/ should not be used for references! The URN is provided by Deutsche Nationalbiblothek. Individual papers do not (yet) have a URN.

Note that the ISSN number 1613-0073 identifies CEUR-WS.org as a publication series, not an individual volume within CEUR-WS.org! We recommend not to include the ISSN number in a citation of a paper that appeared in CEUR-WS.org. If you do prefer to include it, then insert the ISSN number after the label "CEUR Workshop Proceedings" or after the acronym CEUR-WS.org, not after the label of your workshop/conference or attached to your volume number. We do not issue ISBN numbers for volumes! Neither do we issue DOIs for individual papers or for volumes.

Here is how to cite a paper and a proceedings volume with BibTeX (assuming the BibLaTeX extension). We recommend to always create a separate @proceedings entry for the volume, as it will facilitate citing two or more papers from that volume. Note that some volumes come with a ready-to-use BibTeX file.

@inproceedings{LM:Greycite2013,
  title = {Twenty-Five Shades of {Greycite}: Semantics for Referencing and Preservation},
  author = {Phillip Lord and Lindsay Marshall},
  pages = {10--21},
  url = {http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-994/paper-01.pdf},
  crossref = {SePublica2013},
}
@proceedings{SePublica2013,
  booktitle = {3\textsuperscript{rd} Workshop on Semantic Publishing (SePublica)},
  year = 2013,
  editor = {Garc{\'i}a Castro, Alexander and Christoph Lange and Phillip Lord and Robert Stevens},
  number = 994,
  series = {CEUR Workshop Proceedings},
  address = {Aachen},
  issn = {1613-0073},
  url = {http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-994},
  venue = {Montpellier, France},
  eventdate = {2013-05-26},
  title = {Proceedings of the 3\textsuperscript{rd} Workshop on Semantic Publishing, {Extended} {Semantic} {Web} {Conference}}
}

Frequently Asked Questions

Are CEUR-WS.org workshop proceedings automatically indexed by publication databases such as DBLP, Scopus, etc.?

DBLP indexes many CEUR-WS.org proceedings volumes. We do not have a formal relation with DBLP but cooperate with them to make it as easy as possible for them to index our proceedings volumes. However, there is no guarantee that your proceedings volume will be indexed automatically. You (as proceedings editor) are advised to contact DBLP yourself to check whether your volume shall be considered by DBLP for indexing. Other popular search engines and publication databases, e.g. Scopus, GoogleScholar etc. also crawl CEUR-WS.org or DBLP on a regular basis. We have no formal relation with any of them. If they have a wrong or missing entry on your publication, then you need to communicate with them, not with us! We have no communication channels to these indexers.

Can I register a URN in advance?

You can ask for a volume number in advance. However, we only register a URN for a volume once it has been published. Nevertheless, you can compute the URN of your volume in advance using the check digit calculation service of the German National Library. In this form, please enter urn:nbn:de:0074-XXXX-, where XXXX is your reserved volume number.

I am an author of a paper published in a CEUR-WS.org volume. Can I put a copy of my paper in the institutional repository of my university/institute/organization? Can I publish it elsewhere?

You hold the copyright to your paper. So, you are free to do so. You don't even have to ask us or the editor of your volume. Likewise, you can put a copy of your paper on your personal website. You can use the version of the paper published at CEUR-WS.org.

The second question is different. Putting a paper on an institutional repository is not a re-publication. It just is a copy of the same paper with the same bibliographic meta data. As a copyright holder, you could legally re-publish your paper also with another channel, e.g. by submitting it to another conference or a journal. This may legally be permitted, but it could establish a case of self-plagiarism. It is quite usual to extend a workshop or conference paper considerably and then submit it to a journal or a major conference. Some research communities, in particular from computer science, regard this as ethically acceptable as long as the extended version significantly exceeds the original paper and a reference to the original paper is given. We have no role in judging particular cases.

We are academic publishers and want to publish a book with papers on a certain subject. We like to include some papers published at CEUR-WS.org. Do you allow us to do so?

You need permission from the authors, not from us. We do not see a reason to re-publish a paper that is anyway freely available at CEUR-WS.org.

We are the organizers of a workshop/conference. We plan to publish our proceedings with you. Is this possible?

Yes, just follow instructions at http://ceur-ws.org/HOWTOSUBMIT.html.

How long does it take to publish a volume?

If your submission (ZIP file and PUT-FORM) meets our requirements, it takes only a couple of days in most cases. In 2014 and 2015 there were only 7 out of more than 400 volumes whose publication took longer than one week; in most cases this was due to the initial submission not meeting the requirements. In recent years, the number of submissions has increased significantly, leading to somewhat longer cycle times for publishing a submission. Hence, give us at least one week time before reminding us of your submission.

Why is a hand signature required on the PUT-FORM?

CEUR-WS.org is committed to publishing proceedings with a long term sustainability, both from a legal and from a technical perspective, and in a way that works easily for a wide audience. At the time of this writing (2016), trustable digital signatures based on cryptography would require considerable technical experience and infrastructure both on the side of the volume editors and on our side. So far, a scan or photograph of a hand-written signature on printed paper is the only signature that meets all these requirements. All kinds of digital imagery that does not involve cryptography, such as hand signatures produced with a digital pen, are too easy to forge, and thus not acceptable.

We would like to start our own sub-series, what should we do?

Having a sub-series is a relatively new feature -- currently there is only one sub-series: AI*IA Series. If you are interested in having your own sub-series, you first need to make sure that you fulfill the following requirements:

If you complete all the above requirements, please contact us and we will take your request into consideration. Every request is considered and discussed in details by all the members of the CEUR-WS.org management team and the advisory board.

We are a company working in the online advertisement industry. We like to make you a proposal for placing advertisement on your site. Are you interested?

No.

No. The logo is reserved for use at CEUR-WS.org. When advertising your workshop, you may use a phrase like "Proceedings shall be submitted to CEUR-WS.org for online publication" in your Call for Papers.

Can you tell me how many times my paper was downloaded in the last year? I need this information for my academic assessment and/or for claiming a retribution from copyright claims associations.

No. We do not maintain such counters.




CEUR-WS.org Team
Sun SITE Central Europe Homepage
21-Apr-1995 (16-Jan-2019/MJ)