CEUR-WS.org

Publishing with CEUR-WS.org

This document is addressed to organizers of scientific workshops who are interested in distributing the proceedings of their workshops electronically.

Policy of CEUR-WS.org

Reasons to publish via CEUR-WS.org

We invite organizers of scientific 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 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 2011-11-29):
  1. Peer review: Proceedings papers must be peer-reviewed. Invited papers may be included without being peer-reviewed, provided that the majority of papers in the proceedings are not invited papers.
  2. Minimum size: There shall be at least six papers in a submitted volume. The minimum length of a regular paper should be five pages. Invited papers can have less pages. The whole proceedings volume should have at least 40 pages excluding frontmatter.
  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.
PhD workshops form an exception to the open submission rule in the following sense: If your volume would violate the "minimum size" constraint, then consider to form a joint submission with other workshops that were held at the same event: See Vol-646 for an example. We are rather strict on the size constraint and want to avoid unnecessary rejections.

How to publish

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

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

"Copyright © XXXX for the individual papers by the papers' authors. Copying permitted only for private and academic purposes. This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors."
where XXXX is the year in which the papers were produced - typically the same year in which the workshop took place. The copyright phrase tells readers of your proceedings volumes the conditions under which they can download individual papers (resp. material contained in your volume). Make sure that the rights you obtained from the paper authors are compatible with this phrase! Specifically, the PDFs of the papers in your proceedings may not include a phrase that transfers the author copyright to another organization such as ACM/IEEE, who typically acquire exclusive copyright transfers. Be aware that CEUR-WS.org has no obligation to track copyrights violators. We, i.e. the management team of CEUR-WS.org and the editorial board of Sun SITE Central Europe, take no responsibility for any damage caused by the publication of your proceedings volume. See disclaimer for more details. You are the publisher of your own proceedings volume, CEUR-WS.org is just an electronic paper store.

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) should be avoided. Better put them on the home page of your workshop 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. In particular, you are supposed to use the "CEUR" class tags as advised in the master layout. You may want to use a uniform style for your authors. See Vol-XXX/samplestyles for some examples. We encourage to use one of these styles because they will include in each paper a reference back to the proceedings volume where they appeared.

From the year 2008 onwards, we impose certain preconditions, in particular on the minimum size of a proceedings volume. Make sure your submissions fulfills the preconditions.

View the index file as ASCII text rather than as HTML code. Your file index.html must at least contain the title of the material and the names/addresses of the editors (normally identical to the publishers). It must use the style sheet http://ceur-ws.org/ceur-ws.css which defines some common layout for proceedings volumes. It may not contain or start executable code such as Java, Javascript, Active-X or any other type of executable code. Neither may it contain cookie definitions nor invisible pixels and the like. You can check the consistency/completeness of the submission directory by accessing it locally with your Web browser. Please 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 MS-Office-WinWord tend to produce unreadable HTML code which we want to avoid in CEUR-WS.org. The FONT command should not be used unless for exceptional cases like a footnote or an acknowledgement. Special characters like umlauts and accents should be encoded in HTML by their command form, e.g ä for ä. Using 8-bit ASCII codes for such characters is likely to cause problems. 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 accomodate the common style of CEUR-WS.org and to include volume numbers and similar meta information.

Rules for papers in the proceedings

The submitted papers have to be written in the Latin alphabet. There are no specific restrictions on the language of the submitted papers. However, we must be able to verify the scientific nature of the papers.

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 one of the following formats (ordered by preference):

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".

Local vs. absolute links

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

Paper files and other items should 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 home pages and home pages of scientific institutions (or research labs) sponsoring the workshop. 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 web page in their index file of their CEUR-WS volume. This allows readers to easily locate further information about the workshop such as the call for papers. We also recommend to include a back link from the workshop page to the CEUR-WS volume.

LaTeX optimizations for PDF

If the papers are prepared by LaTeX 2e or LaTeX 2.09 and converted to PDF format, then the fonts might look ugly since they are represented as bitmaps. Most LaTeX installations contain alternative Postscript fonts which result in much more readable PDF files. Please try the following settings directly behind the documentclass command with LaTeX 2e: 
  \usepackage{times,latexsym}  % use Postscript font instead of TeX times and math fonts
If you are using the older version LaTeX 2.09, then the Postscript fonts have to be configured in the first line, e.g. 
  \documentstyle[times,latexsym]{article}
Note that some LaTeX installations do not include Postscript fonts. Then you cannot use the above optimizations for PDF. Other text processors like StarWriter and MS-Word produce Postscript files that can be converted to readable PDF without the abovementioned font problem.

Images in HTML files

If your proceedings volume contains images, then you should prefer PNG (portable network graphics) over other formats like GIF. The GIF format is not free for all purposes and is therefore not suitable for free information services like CEUR-WS.org.

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!

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.

One way is to deal with page numbers is to assign them local per paper, e.g. paper 1 has pages 1.1 to 1.14, paper 2 has pages 2.1 to 2.15, and so forth. You should in this case inform the author about their paper number so that they can produce the right page numbering of their final paper version.

If you want to supply absolute page numbers, then you need to produce an integrated proceedings document and include the page numbers from the integrated proceedings document. Absolute page numbers are preferable but they also require much more work on your side.

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

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

Title capitalization

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

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  ABCD08.zip ABCD08
creates a submission file for the material contained in the directory ABCD08. Use meaningful names for the submission file, e.g. the acronym of the workshop. Under Windows, you can use packers like WinZIP, PKZIP or similar to produce the submission file. But beware: use ISO-standard file names! In particular, blank characters in file names are not allowed. Under Unix, you may also use the 'tar/gzip' commands to create the submission directory. Make sure that the submission file expands to a directory and not to files in the current directory. Subsequently, the procedures PUT (submit a proceedings volume to be published on CEUR-WS.org) and DELETE (remove a published volume) are explained. These two procedures shall be executed by one of the proceedings editors., i.e. by you. You should in particular sign the corresponding fax, and you should be the person mentioned in the clause "submitted by ..." at the end of the index file of the volume. If you are one of the editors but the technical upload is done by a person who is not one of the editors, then you should use the clause "submitted by your name, other name" in the index file.

B. Procedure PUT

  1. Make sure that you have the exclusive or non-exclusive right to publish the material you are going to submit.
  2. 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 procede.
  3. Share the submission file with your authors to give them a last chance to identify errors. Give them sufficient time (a few days) to report errors. We do not monitor this step but assume that you take care of it.
  4. Print the PUT FAX form, fill it out, and sign it.
  5. Make a scan of the signed PUT-FAX (format pdf or jpg); name the scanned file PUT-FAX-ABCD08.pdf (.jpg), where ABCD08 is the acronym of your workshop.
  6. Transfer the submission file and the scanned PUT-FAX file via bscw-upload. Note that you have to apply this form twice, once for the submission file and a second time for the scanned PUT-FAX.

Use proper document names for the submission file like ABCD08.zip and PUT-FAX-ABCD08.pdf for the scanned PUT-FAX. ZIP format is preferred for the submission file. You may additionally send us the PUT-FAX via FAX or regular mail but that is no longer a requirement since 2009-11-17. If the transmission via the bscw-upload fails, then please put the submission file on your own ftp/www server and notify us by email to download it manually.

The PUT-FAX has no direct legal role for us. It indicates to us that you are aware of copyright issues. If the material is accepted by us you will receive a notification with the bibliographic reference of the material.

Some proceedings editors would like to get a CEUR-WS volume number assigned to their workshop in advance to the publication at CEUR-WS, for example to to include the URL of the proceedings volume in the frontmatter of the proceedings. To do so, just contact the manager of this site via email (see end of this page) and specify a deadline until which the proceedings volume will be uploaded. It is not a requirement to ask in advance for a volume number. Neither do we recommend to ask for a volume number in advance. If you have received an advance volume number, we expect that the submission will arrive before the promised deadline, and that you strictly follow the instructions for submission. Note that the assignment of a volume number is not a guarantee that your volume gets published at CEUR-WS.org. Your submission must still fulfill the preconditions. Our preferred procedure is that we assign the next free volume number to your proceedings as soon as you upload the submission file and send the accompanying PUT FAX. This creates less work on our side.

C. Procedure DELETE

You may remove your proceedings from our server at any time, even without telling us the reason. A reason could be that you want to publish the proceedings as a book and the publisher requests exclusive copyright for that. Note: this holds for proceedings editors but not for authors of individual papers. We will not remove individual papers from published proceedings. Only complete volumes can be removed. You should make the authors of papers aware of this rule.
  1. Print the DELETE FAX form, fill it out, sign it, and send it to the fax number +31-13-466-3069
CEUR-WS.org is only responsible for removing the specified proceedings volume from its own site. Copies of the volume published elsewhere are outside the scope of CEUR-WS.org and will not be removed upon reception of a DELETE-FAX! This is true in particular for services which scan the Web for online papers and make copies of the papers available in their own site. Examples of such services are Citeseer and scholar.google.com. CEUR-WS.org has no legal relationship with any such organization. We neither authorize nor track their activities wrt. papers published on CEUR-WS.org.

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

How to correct errors in an already published volume

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

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

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

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 from the work of others. 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 provide use. Only such use is permitted!

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

Many proceedings editors distribute printed versions of their proceedings volumes 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 online version like indicated above for the case of re-publications. You may of course include a phrase like

"Also appeared online with CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org, ISSN 1613-0073)"
on one of the introductory pages of your printed proceedings volume.

Authors of individual papers are not restricted by CEUR-WS.org to re-publish their papers elsewhere. In fact, CEUR-WS.org does not acquire rights from authors: authors pass rights to the proceedings editors. This is typically a non-exclusive right to publish the author's paper. By doing so, authors can of course no longer publish their papers with another publisher who demands the transfer of the exclusive copyright! This would violate the earlier transfer of non-exclusive copyrights to the proceedings editors.

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 we impose is that the re-publication is clearly distinguishable from the version published at CEUR-WS.org (see above).

We forbid 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. A mirror would negatively affect the authenticity of CEUR-WS.org. At the end, why would anyone want to have a mirror of something that is freely accessible anyway?

How to reference papers published via CEUR-WS.org

A paper in a CEUR-WS.org volume should be referenced using its online URL, for example 
   M. Lenzerini: Description logics for schema level reasoning in databases.
   Proc. of 1st Workshop KRDB'94, Saarbrücken, Germany, September 20-22, 1994,
   CEUR-WS.org, online CEUR-WS.org/Vol-1/lenzerini.pdf.
Use CEUR-WS.org as 'publisher' for the paper even though the respective volume is legally published by its editors. A shorter form for citing a paper can be: 
   M. Lenzerini: Description logics for schema level reasoning in databases.
   Proc. of 1st Workshop KRDB'94, Saarbrücken, Germany, September 20-22, 1994,
   CEUR-WS.org/Vol-1/lenzerini.pdf.
A whole proceedings volume can be referenced by its ONLINE URL as follows: 
   Enrico Franconi, Michael Kifer (eds.): Knowledge Representation meets Databases 1999.
   Proc. 6th Intl. Workshop KRDB'99, Linköping, Sweden, July 29-30, 1999,
   CEUR-WS.org, online CEUR-WS.org/Vol-21.
We also assign a persistent identifier (URN) to proceedings volumes published at CEUR-WS.org. You can use the URN instead of the ONLINE URL like shown in this example: 
   Massimo Melucci, Stefano Mizzaro, Gabriella Pasi (eds.): Italian Information Retrieval Workshop 2010.
   Proceedings of the First Italian Information Retrieval Workshop (IIR-2010), Padua, Italy,
   January 27-28, 2010, CEUR-WS.org/Vol-560, urn:nbn:de:0074-560-7.

We will continue to assign ONLINE URLs to new volumes. The URN is an additional identification scheme. The 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 or attached to your volume number. We do not issue ISBN numbers for volumes!



Manfred Jeusfeld, Publisher of CEUR-WS.org
Ruzica Piskac, Managing Editor of CEUR-WS.org
Sun SITE Central Europe Homepage
21-Apr-1995 (31-Jan-2012/MJf)