#openaccess: Understanding #CCBY as used by #CEURWS

CEUR-WS has adopted the Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) for papers and volumes published on CEUR-WS.org.

It is important to to understand the difference between the legal provisions of CC-BY (see above) and the academic rules for publishing papers. The latter cover among other plagiarism, which is not so much a concern of CC-BY. CC-BY is a very liberal license. It supports the open-access publication chain by authorizing the publishers and users to store, access and distribute the papers.

CC-BY does not prevent certain undesired uses. For example, a third person could select a number of CC-BY-licensed papers and republish them in a book, as long as the clauses of CC-BY are not violated. This may not even require consent by the authors. Clearly, this is against academic standards. So, sanctions should be considered within the rule system of academia, e.g. by designating such a publisher as predatory.

Overall, the advantages of CC-BY are stronger than its disadvantages. CC-BY is the defacto standard for open-access publishing. Let’s hope that we get an improved version CC-BY 5.0 where some of the concerns are addressed.

#CEURWS: Rule for location designations of disputed regions

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 names in affiliation when the 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.