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

• The organizers and program committee members come overwhelmingly from computer-science departments and have a degree in computer science (or a related discipline such as information systems, business informatics).
• The vast majority of papers included in the proceedings have at least one author coming from a computer science department and/or having a computer-science degree (or a related discipline such as information systems, business informatics).
• The papers in the proceedings mainly apply research methods from computer science (or a related discipline such as information systems, business informatics). It is not sufficient to use computer programs as a tool for facilitating the research methods from another discipline such as material science.

• The copyright and any similar right for the proceedings and all included material remain with the papers' authors/owners (for the individual papers) and with the proceedings editors (for the proceedings volume as a whole). The proceedings editors are responsible for the quality of the published content and its bilbliographic metadata.
• User rights are expressed by the license dedication of a volume and its contents. New volumes after summer 2019 adopt the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY 4.0) license. Older volumes permit the use for private and academic purposes. See the appropriate license dedication in the volume and/or the digital artefact/paper in a volume.
• CEUR-WS.org provides published proceedings and papers as 'open access'. CEUR-WS.org employs no access control.
• CEUR-WS.org has the right to adapt the index file of a proceedings file to conform to the common style of CEUR-WS.org. Adaptions to the style can lead to certain adaptions of the style of the index file of a published volume. We also reserve the right to correct errors in the index file.
• CEUR-WS.org has the right to tag published papers (e.g. the pdf file) with bibliographic details (e.g. paper URL).
• CEUR-WS.org is not obliged to publish a submission. The CEUR-WS Team decides whether or not to publish a submission on the basis of the policy and pre-conditions spelled out in this document. The CEUR-WS Team is not obliged to justify its decision.

Benefits at CEUR-WS.org

• Thanks to the management of Sun SITE Central Europe at RWTH Aachen, the service is free of charge for organizers of scientific workshops/conferences and for the readers of their proceedings.
• CEUR-WS.org aims at a high service level. Proceedings are usually made available online within a couple of days after submission. It may also take several weeks depending on our workload and the number of errors in the submission.
• Proceedings are assigned a uniform bibliographic identifier, being its "cool" uniform resource locator (URL) http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-XXX. Papers in volumes also have cool URLs such as http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-XXX/paper1.pdf. We assign persistent identifiers (URN) to all published volumes in collaboration with Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

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

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 written by academics (usually holding a PhD). PhD student workshops are a notable exception (see below). We do not support workshop/conference 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 / PhD workshops: Submissions for proceedings of PhD workshops (=workshops targeting only PhD students) are possible as an exception to the open submission rule. The workshop has to be organized by senior researchers. The workshop should target all PhD students working on the topics mentioned in the call for papers, i.e. it should not be restricted to PhD students from a restricted set of organizations. The title of the workshop shall indicate its type, e.g. "PhD Workshop on Machine Learning". PhD student as authors are exempted from the "DBLP footprint" mentioned above.

• Conference proceedings: We may publish conference proceedings if the conference series is already well-established in the international academic community. A conference proceedings typically may have a larger number of papers compared to workshop proceedings. Conference organizers are advised to contact us via email before they submit their proceedings for the first time.

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

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). 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. They must then also attach a copy of the permission by the third party to use this material in the signed author agreement!

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

"Copyright © JJJJ for the individual papers by the papers' authors. Copyright © JJJJ for the volume as a collection by its editors. This volume and its papers are published under the Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)."

"Copyright © JJJJ for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)."

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 select "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).

Authors need to use the uniform CEURART style for the papers. You can choose either the 1-column or the 2-column style as the uniform style for your proceedings. The CEURART style can be found here.

2021-11-30: the previously used script ceur-make is deprecated since it does not produce index.html files that are compatible with our latest format for the index.html file of a proceedings volume. Thus, produce that file manually from the source of Vol-XXX/index.html. We are working on a replacement for ceur-make.

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

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

• A regular paper has at least 10 "standard" pages (1 standard page = 2500 characters) and an appropriate number of references. It shall contain enough substance that it can be cited in other publications. There may be exceptions from this rule for specific types of workshops/conferences but then please discuss the exception with us prior to the submission. Use the CEURTITLE/CEURAUTHOR/CEURPAGES labels for tagging these papers.
• A short paper is still a paper with references but has between 5-9 "standard" pages. Short papers shall also use the CEURTITLE/CEURAUTHOR/CEURPAGES labels in the index file. The index file shall clearly indicate whether a paper is a short paper or a regular-length paper. This can be done in different ways. For example, the whole volume could consist of short papers. Then, the full name of the volume could be "Short Paper Proceedings of ...". The short papers could also be grouped by the CEURSESSION element with label "Short Papers". If a short paper is grouped together with regular papers, its CEURTITLE can be followed by the string "(short paper)". Sometimes, the term "extended abstract" is also used as a synonym to "short paper".
• An abstract is a paper with a title, author and abstract but without a body and without references. Such papers are common for invited talks. Such abstracts can be included in the submission but should use a title that includes the word "abstract" or "extended abstract" like in "The Future of Data Mining - Abstract".
• A poster paper is a paper with a title, author and a very short text, i.e. less than 5 "standard" pages. Such papers are not regarded as citable contributions and should be handled like an abstract. Poster papers that are containing novel results (and are not summarizing results already published elsewhere) may be an exception. It depends on the substance of the content of the paper. Editors need to decide this together with the reviewers of the paper.
• A preface is typically a short text by the workshop/conference organizers that is part of the front matter of the proceedings. In most cases, a preface is not citable and thus you should not use the CEURTITLE/CEURAUTHOR/CEURPAGES tags for them. There is however an exception: if the preface is a longer introduction to the workshop/conference topic and has its own set of references, then it shall be treated similar to a regular paper. Give it a suitable title (not just "Preface") and authors (the workshop/conference organizers).
• A pre-published paper is a paper presented at a workshop/conference that has already been published elsewhere. Such papers should not be included in a volume submitted to CEUR-WS. Editors may however decide to include an abstract of the paper in the volume and prescribe appropriate paper titles that distinguish the abtract from the original paper and use the keyword "abstract" in the paper title. Note that a permission by the copyright holder is required to do so!

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

Local vs. absolute links

  HREF="paper1.pdf"

  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

How to deal with page numbers

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

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

1. Preparing the submission file
   Ken Bar, Anne Foé
2. Filling an Author Agreement by Autocompletion
   Mary Doe, Peter Müstermann

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)."

Creating the submission file

 zip -r sub_file.zip dir_name

 zip -r  ABCD19.zip ABCD19

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

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.

• If the submission site is offline, we have an alternative procedure: Put the submission file and the AGREEMENTS ZIP file 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. Make sure that we can access the two ZIP files without a password!

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

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. 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 by using the ticket system 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.

Top errors in submissions

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="ftp://SunSITE.Informatik.RWTH-Aachen.DE/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.

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.

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:

• the CEUR-WS.org volume numbering CEUR-WS.org/Vol-1,CEUR-WS.org/Vol-2,...
• the label "CEUR" as part of the URL to the online location of the proceedings
• the ISSN number 1613-0073
• the CEUR-WS.org logo
• the precise wording of the standard phrase for the copyright indication
• the CEUR-WS.org style

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)

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.

How to reference papers published via CEUR-WS.org

   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.

   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.

   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.

   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.

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:

• The sub-series can be granted only to an association or community with an internationally recognized scientific legacy. In addition, we require that this community has an organizational structure. The negotiations about the series should be lead by the president or a spokesperson, on behalf of the whole community.
• The community should organize and publish several different events per a year.
• There should be an associate editor from that community who takes over the responsibility for the sub-series.

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).".

FAQ 11: Can we use the CEUR-WS logo on our (workshop) website?

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.