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Publishing at CEUR-WS.org (valid from 2019-08-01)

2019-07-02: This is the new procedure reflecting our adoption of CC BY 4.0 as the license for newly published proceedings. Existing volumes are not affected by the new license model. See here for our old procedure valid until end of July 2019.

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

CEUR-WS.org publishes computer science workshop proceedings

A computer science workshop proceedings volume is characterized as follows:

Open Access Policy at CEUR-WS.org

Benefits at CEUR-WS.org

We invite organizers of computer science workshops 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 international program committee: Proceedings papers must be peer-reviewed by a program committee of well-known international scholars, who are experts in the topics presented in the proceedings. 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. If the workshop/track is part of a larger event (conference), then there must be a dedicated call for papers and program committee different from the call for papers / program committee of the larger event.
  2. Minimum size: There shall be at least six papers in a submitted volume. The minimum length of a regular or short paper should be five "standard" pages (=2500 chars per page, calculated from a sample of LNCS one-column papers). 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 "standard" pages) and short papers (5-9 "standard" 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. Single location, single time: The workshop/conference must take place (physically) at one location for the usual duration of such an event at a sequence of consecutive days. 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). Due to a significant 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 a so-called DBLP-footprint with the number of publications listed in DBLP.org for each author and/or PC member.
  9. No "student" proceedings: We expect that the papers are (co-)authored by academics, usually PhD holders. PhD student workshops are a notable exception (see below). We do not support student proceedings dedicated for master/bachelor students as main authors. Regular proceedings may include a few student papers if their number is small compared to the total number of papers and if those papers are reviewed in the same way as all other papers. (This rule formally applies for submissions after 2020-04-01.)
  10. Timeliness: The submission of a proceedings volume should be close to the event date, not more than 2 years after the event. Exceptions may be possible but need to be negotiated with us.
  11. Format We require that authors use the new CEURART style for writing papers to be published with CEUR-WS.
Doctoral consortiums also form an exception to the open submission rule in the following sense: CEUR-WS is mainly about workshop proceedings, since we believe that they are the place where new results tend to be presented first to an academic audience, at least in computer science. We publish conference proceedings only as a rare exception: 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-3443 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 that have a cross-section with neighbor disciplines if they are written from a computer science and/or information systems point of view. That concerns the research methods used in the papers, not the fact whether or not computers are used for the research. The workshop/conference should have a clear focus on specific computer science 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 guidelines 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 papers in a volume must be in English. English is the de facto standard when you want to target an international audience. The submitted papers have to be written in the Latin alphabet. Spell author names in Latin characters (accents are allowed). Avoid non-Latin characters in the paper titles (in some cases special characters, e.g. for mathematical concepts, are allowed).

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

CEUR-WS.org is a publication service of RWTH Aachen. The hosting is provided by Informatik 5 at RWTH Aachen. The publishing workflow is provided by the members of the CEUR-WS Team, consisting of academics from all over the world. In CEUR-WS.org, you as proceedings editor are responsible for the quality of the material and its bibliographic metadata. The academic quality shall be safeguarded by a proper peer-review process. The metadata quality is a particular responsibility of yours. You submit the material to our server (see procedure PUT below). We 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 get aware of a new submission when it is uploaded (procedure PUT). There is no pre-approval step. We are free in our decision to accept your submission, but will follow the rules layed out in this documents. You, the proceedings editor, are responsible for having acquired the non-exclusive right for electronic publication for all published material (papers, images, metadata, etc.) from the copyright owners, in particular the papers' authors via the CEUR-WS AUTHOR-AGREEMENT form:

Author agreement variants

  1. AUTHOR-AGREEMENT (NTP): Authors shall use this form if they included no copyrighted third party material in their paper text (or accompanying sources, datasets), and no material in the paper was produced with the help of Generative Artificial Intelligence tools including tools based on large language models (LLM). This is the right variant in most cases.
  2. AUTHOR-AGREEMENT (TP): Authors shall use this form if they did include copyrighted third party material in their paper or accompanying material or they used Generative Artificial Intelligence tools to produce material in the paper. In case of third party material, they must then append a copy of the permission(s) by the third parties to use this material to the signed author agreement! In the case of material produced by Generative Artificial Intelligence tools, they must fill in and sign a declaration on which elements of the paper was produced by AI tools, see AI STATEMENT. This signed declaration must then be scanned and appended to the signed author agreement. Check ACADEMIC-ETHICS for our rules on including such material.
You, the editor, need to collect the correctly signed author agreements plus the editor agreement and pass it to us via the upload procedure. The name and year of the event in the editor and author agreements shall be the same the you plan to use as the full proceedings title used in the file index.html. This shall also be the name of the event specified in the footnote of page 1 of the papers. if the proceedings is a joint proceentings of multiple workshop (co-located with the same conference), the use as event name the full name of the joint proceeings title, e.g. "Joint Proceedings of the ELDC 2024 Workshops ABCD and DEFG".

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 proceedings editors (normally identical to the workshop organizers). 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.

Do not include script code (Javascript or similar) in your index.html file or paper files (eg. if papers are rendered as HTML).

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.

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

The page limit of 10 pages to distinguish regular from short papers is a rough indication. The workshop/conference organizers may impose their own rules on page counts for regular vs. short papers. A paper with less than 10 "standard" pages should however not be classified as a regular paper.

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.

CEURART style files for papers

From 2022 onwards, we require that authors use the new CEURART style for writing papers to be published with CEUR-WS. The style is available from Vol-XXX. An Overleaf page for LaTeX users is available at as template. Editors are encouraged create an adaption of this page for their authors, e.g. by filling in the name of the event and some other meta data, and then publish an Overleaf page specifically for their authors.

You can also download an offline version with the style files from http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-XXX/CEURART.zip. It also contains DOCX template files. You can choose between 1-column style and 2-column style. However, these should not be mixed in the proceedings volume. We may in the future prescribe that all submissions use the 1-column CEURART style! More information on the CEURART style can be found in our blog entry.

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 an Author Agreement 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 an Author Agreement 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 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.

License footnote in paper PDFs

The PDFs (or other formats supported by CEUR-WS) of each paper to be published must contain a footnote on the first page that designates the paper as being published under the CC BY 4.0 license. The text shall be like

"Copyright © JJJJ for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)."
The string JJJJ is to be replaced by the publication year of the paper within the volume. See exceptions for Crown or US government employees.

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  ABCD19.zip ABCD19
creates a submission file for the material contained in the directory ABCD19. 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 procedure PUT (submit a proceedings volume to be published on CEUR-WS.org) is explained. This procedure shall be executed by one of the proceedings editors., i.e. by you. You should in particular sign the EDITOR-AGREEMENT, 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.

ZIP file size limitation: Our system allows maximum 100MB per ZIP file. In case of the AGREEMENTS ZIP file (step 5 below), make sure that authors use a reasonable resolution for the scan of the signed agreements. One scanned agreements should not use more than approx. 1MB space.

Location designation for disputed regions

There a few regions in the world that are disputed between countries and where the current executive government is not recognized by many other countries. CEUR-WS takes no position in such cases but we ask editors of volumes to follow these two rules:
  1. We expect that proceedings editors advise authors to use neutral location names in their affiliation, if the corresponding region is disputed.
  2. We require that proceedings editors use neutral location names in the main index.html file and in frontmatter/preface, if the event is organized in a disputed region.

B. Upload (Procedure PUT)

  1. Collect and carefully check the signed AUTHOR-AGREEMENT from each contact author of a paper to be included in your proceedings. Only accept signed author agreement that were originally physically signed with an ink pen on paper (why?). Authors shall send an electronic scan (jpg or pdf) of their signed agreement to you. Keep a copy of these signed agreements for your own records. The scans of the signed author agreements must have filenames like AUTHOR-AGREEMENT-paperX.pdf, where paperX is the filename of the paper in the proceedings index file.
  2. Avoid the most-frequent mistakes. Take this step very seriously!
  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 or to provide corrected versions of their papers. We do not monitor this step but assume that you take care of it. Note that after publication of your volume, you will only have two days to correct certain bibliographic errors in a volume! So, you need to do this quality check BEFORE the submission! See also procedure for requesting corrections.
  5. Print the EDITOR-AGREEMENT, 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 EDITOR-AGREEMENT (format pdf or jpg); name the scanned file EDITOR-AGREEMENT-ABCD19.pdf (.jpg), where ABCD19 is the acronym of your workshop/conference. Put the scanned signed editor agreement plus scans of all signed author agreements (see step 1) into a ZIP file with name AGREEMENTS-ABCD19.zip. Note that you may have to include an AUTHOR-AGREEMENT for the preface written by the editors.
  6. Go to https://submissions.ceur-ws.org/. Open a new ticket, select the ticket topic from "Help Topic" and choose "New submission". Fill any information needed and provide the two ZIP files for the proceedings and for the author agreements. You will receive a first email to acknowledge reception of the ticket. A second email will be sent to you when a team member will start processing your submission.

Use proper ISO-compliant document names (no blanks in the file names) for the submission file like ABCD19.zip and AGREEMENTS-ABCD19.zip for the scanned editor and author agreements. Only use ZIP format for the submission file and the agreements!

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. If you do not get a response from us after more than 5 workdays, then send us a reminder email. We assign the next free volume number to your proceedings as soon as you upload the submission file and send the accompanying author and editor agreements. This is a mature procedure and creates least work on our side.
Note! The advance reservation of volume number is discontinued by 2021-04-01!

The actual date of execution of PUT is subject to local policy of the management of CEUR-WS.org and SunSITE.Informatik.RWTH-Aachen.DE.

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 and faulty links 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. 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. 2024-03-21), 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 by using our ticket system. The easiest way is to attach the Corrections-Vol-XXX.zip to an answer to the last message on your current ticket for the volume. Your can also create a new ticket https://submissions.ceur-ws.org/open.php with Help Topic "Volume correction". Attach/drop the file Corrections-Vol-XXX.zip (XXX to be replaced by your volume number) to the ticket.
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.html and pdf files.
    Always use the latest template http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-XXX/index.html! All papers must be formatted with the CEURART style.
  2. Papers with incompatible license clauses.
    This occurs when your authors use an unedited format file that assigns the copyright to another publisher, or uses a license clause that is too different from the standard CEUR-WS.org CC-BY 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="http://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/ftp/pub/publications/CEUR-WS/Vol-XXX.zip">Complete proceedings in one ZIP file</a>
  8. False paper classification.
    If a paper is only an abstract then the title of the paper must indicate it. Similar with invited papers.
  9. Mistakes in the editor/author agreements.
    Some editors/authors still copy/paste bitmaps of their signatures into the copyright agreements or sign on a touchscreen, instead of signing physically with a pen on paper. Further some authors forget to completely fill out the form.
    2020-03-28: Due to the fact that currently many are working in their home offices, we temporarily accept an alternative to signing the form by hand on paper. You can also fill in the form on the computer and place a hand-signed statement below the form and then take a photo of it, see example surrogate agreement.
The contact editor (the person who submitted the proceedings and signed the EDITOR-AGREEMENT) must 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 (in contrast to morally) allowed to re-publish their paper with a second publisher. While this appears lawful, it could be regarded as self-plagiarism or double publication. We strongly discourage such re-publication of papers that are already published with us. Likewise, do not publish papers with us that are already published by another publisher. 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 at CEUR-WS.

AI-based writing assistance tools may only be used under very strict rules, in particular such tools may not bve used to create substantial parts of a paper's conceptual ideas. See our academic ethics page for details.

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 (or any entity with the right to re-publish) 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 publish their papers as open-access licensed via the Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). To do so, authors need to include an appropriate footnote on their papers and sign the AUTHOR-AGREEMENT. The signed agreement shall be passed to the proceedings editors, who shall pass electronic copies of these agreements together with the EDITOR-AGREEMENT as part of the submission procedure.

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, post-print or the published version of his CEUR-WS.org paper on his homepage, an institutional repository, or elsewhere. We advise authors to be careful about publishing versions of their paper that deviate from the originally published version because it could diminish the authenticity of the paper.

The editors confirm to us in the signed EDITOR-AGREEMENT 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, beyond the rights entailed by the author/editor agreements. The editors of the volume hold the right to publish the complete volume. The editors execute this right by submitting the volume on CEUR-WS.org. Authors do not have the right to demand the removal or update of their paper published at CEUR-WS.org, except for the cases mentioned in the author agreement. Any communication of authors about their papers shall instead be directed to the editors of their proceedings volume.

The published version of a paper on CEUR-WS.org may be watermarked by its URL at CEUR-WS.org and by the CEUR-WS logo. These watermarks assure the reader that this is the paper original. If a paper published on other repositories carries the CEUR-WS logo, then it must be 100% identical to the original published on CEUR-WS.org. Otherwise, it would violate our rights to the CEUR-WS logo!

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 legal publsiher is RWTH Aachen. CEUR-WS.org is publication service run bu RWTH Aachen. 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


FAQ 1: 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.


FAQ 2: Can I register a URN in advance?

We discontinued the pre-registration of volume numbers (and thus URNs) by 2021-04-01. You can check the URN of a volume number using the check digit calculation service of the German National Library. In this form, please enter urn:nbn:de:0074-XXXX-, where XXXX is a volume number.But note that we do no longer reserve volume numbers in advance. Hence, you can also not compute the URN in advance.


FAQ 3: 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? Can I include it in my cumulative PhD?

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 or double publication. 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.

What concerns cumulative PhDs, there are no restrictions from our side. PhD students, who published their papers in a volume at CEUR-WS, retain the copyright to their papers. Kindly include a reference to the original publication at CEUR-WS. There is no need to ask us for permission.


FAQ 4: 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.


FAQ 5: 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.


FAQ 6: How long does it take to publish a volume?

If your submission (ZIP file with papers and ZIP file with signed agreements) 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.


FAQ 7: Why is a hand signature required on the AUTHOR/EDITOR-AGREEMENT?

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. Note that we do not regard signatures made on touch-sensitive screens as valid.

2020-03-28: Due to the fact that currently many are working in their home offices, we temporarily accept an alternative to signing the form by hand on paper. You can also fill in the form on the computer and place a hand-signed statement below the form and then take a photo of it, see example surrogate agreement.


FAQ 8: We would like to start our own sub-series, what should we do?

An example of a sub-series is the 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.


FAQ 9: 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.


FAQ 10: Can we publish our paper or volume with a different license than CC-BY 4.0?

No. At this moment, we only support CC-BY 4.0 as the single license for both papers and volumes. The license clause in the paper must be as specified here.

Special cases: If an author is a Crown employee (e.g. UK government), the copyright of the paper may be with the Crown. Then, use the license clause "Crown Copyright © JJJJ. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)." for the paper. If the author is an employee of the US government, then there may be no copyright with the paper. In this case, use the license clause "No copyright. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).".


No. The logo is reserved for official 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.


FAQ 12: Can authors use the CEUR-WS logo in the paper PDF?

This is allowed for the official version published at CEUR-WS. If a web-accessible version of the paper contains the CEUR-WS logo, then it must be identical to the version of the paper published on CEUR-WS. Authors can put the original CEUR-WS version of their paper in their institutional repository or their home page. If authors want to publish a version of their paper that deviates from the version published at CEUR-WS, then the CEUR-WS logo must be removed from the that version!


FAQ 13: 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.


FAQ 14: What is the DBLP footprint? Why do we have to provide this information?

CEUR-WS supports the publication of computer-science workshops (and conferences). We sometimes receive submissions that apears to have only marginal relations to computer science. To check the relevance to computer science, we may request editors to provide us with data on how many publications authors and PC members have in the DBLP bibliography. Typically, we demand that each paper has at least one author with at least 5 papers listed in DBLP. PC members should have a higher number of papers in DBLP. The precise thresholds may change and will be specified in our request. The DBLP footprint ist just a simple textfile that editors add to the submission file that contains the requested data. Passing the DBLP footprint test does not guarantee that we shall publish a submission though. All other criteria must also be met. 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.


FAQ 15: Can organizations like companies be authors of a paper in CEUR-WS?

No. Only natural persons can be authors of a paper published in CEUR-WS. Likewise, only natural persons can be editors of a volume in CEUR-WS. AI programs can also not be authors, even when given human-like names.


FAQ 16: I used an AI program to improve the text and/or images in my paper. Is this permitted?

This depends on the nature of the AI program and the paper parts that were created with the help of AI, see also our Academic Ethics rules. For example, a tool to improve the contrast of an image is permitted because it does not change the content of the image. If the image was however generated by AI, you must use a sutaible caption including the phrase "generated by AI tool X". Generating text paragraphs or even whole sections by AI is not permitted. Improving the grammar or writing style by an AI tool is a borderline case. If it adds to or changes the content, then it is not allowed.





CEUR-WS.org Team
Sun SITE Central Europe Homepage
21-Apr-1995 (5-Jun-2024/MJ)