#OPENACCESS #CEURWS in the #YEAR2022: More international, more focused

#CEURWS (CEUR-WS.org) will continue to provide free open-access publication of computer science proceedings. Based on the past experience, we want to further strengthen the international reach of proceedings volumes. This means for future submissions that we will check that the workshop (or conference) needs to be international in its target audience, the program committee, and the authors of the accepted papers. Some workshops may stem from national associations. We do not rule out these cases. But the call for papers shall target a worldwide audience of authors. This should also be reflected in a truly international composition of the program committee, to include well-known experts for the topics mentioned in the call for papers.

Another point of attention is the focus of CEUR-WS. We serve the computer science academic community. Sometimes, a workshop may have a particular cross-disciplinary character. Still, the papers should discuss the research questions from a computer science point of view. This is typically the case when authors have a computer science background.

CEUR-WS started as a publisher for workshop proceedings. Workshops have a rather small set of topics and they try to attract papers from the best experts for these few topics of interest. Later, CEUR-WS also started to publish some conference proceedings. We will continue to do so but the acceptance criteria for conference proceedings are more rigid. Conferences must be truly international and have a rigorous review process. We do not want to publish regional conferences (and for that matter regional workshops) anymore. (New) conferences with a very broad set of topics of interest should better publish elsewhere. There are plenty of alternative publishers!

The CEUR-WS Team has the authority to reject a submission if the pre-conditions are not met or the team believes that CEUR-WS is not the right venue for the submission. Since workshop/conference organizers have enough alternatives, we do not discuss such decisions. You can however make a rejection unlikely by following the rules and certain strategies to ensure the high quality:

1. Workshops co-located with well-known computer science conferences (IEEE, ACM, …). Well-known means that the conference is indexed in DBLP and has a long history.
2. The organizers of a workshop and the PC members are well-known in the fields represented by the workshop. They are mostly from computer science/information systems departments.
3. The program committee is international, as well as the group of authors