We were asked by an organization whether they could store selected papers originally published at CEUR-WS.org in a repository that is used by educational institutions.
Well, rather than storing a copy, you could also store a link to the CEUR-WS URL of the paper in the repository. That link is permanent and should allow the easy download of the paper by the final readers, here the students.
Academic use is covered by the standard copyright phrase of CEUR-WS.org:
- “Copyright © XXXX for the individual papers by the papers’ authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes. This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors.”
However, we as CEUR-WS.org do not hold the copyright to the papers. Hence, we also cannot authorize that other organizations re-distribute the papers.
We chose the generic copyright phrase to reserve the rights with the authors and to let the legal copyright relation be between the authors and the readers.
The case is much different to papers that are under some CC-BY license. Such a license would likely cover the above-mentioned use of the papers. The authors would have licensed such use by a third party that is in between the author and the reader.
Quo vadis CEUR-WS.org? 