#CEURWS: #OpenAccess to the latest developments in #ComputerScience

CEUR-WS.org (CEUR Workshop Proceedings) publishes computer-science workshop proceedings as open-access for free, i.e. without article processing charge (APC). This allows workshop organizers to quickly publish their proceedings. New workshops in computer science are popping up almost every week. They are accelerators of leading edge research in our field. While large conferences and journals rightfully emphasize rigid reviewing, they cannot react so quickly to changes in the academic dialogue as workshops can do. Conferences aim for persistence. Workshops are more short-lived. They pop up, thrive, and disappear when the subject has become mainstream.

So, if you want to learn about the latest trends and results in computer science, then have a look at the recently published volumes at CEUR-WS.org!

#OGL vs. #CCBY for #openaccess publishing at #CEURWS

We received a question from a conference organizer whether we would also accept open-access licenses other than CC-BY 4.0 for publishing proceedings, specifically the (British) Open Government License OGL 3.0. This question was the first time that I heard about this license. After doing a bit of research, it turns out that it shares similarities to CC-BY 4.0.

However, since it has a different wording, it is formally not equivalent to CC-BY 4.0. It is also not widely used for open-access publishing, in particular it will probably not be used outside of the UK. In contrast, CC-BY 4.0 is the de-facto worldwide standard for open-access publishing.

At CEUR-WS, we need to be economic with our resources. We provide the service in our free time and we are not lawyers. We thus uniformly require CC-BY 4.0 for papers. This implies that there is a single set of legal clauses applicable to such papers.

What do you think? Shall we be more liberal with open-access licenses?

Manfred

PS 2021-03-01: We amended our rules on CC-BY at http://ceur-ws.org/HOWTOSUBMIT.html#FAQ-CCBY. CC-BY 4.0 remains mandatory, but the copyright part of the license clause can cater for Crown copyright (certain authors employed the UK gorvernment) and “No copyright” (certain US government authors).