#Openaccess: What is a truly international event for #CEURWS ?

As written in the previous blog entry from January 4, 2022, the CEUR-WS team has decided to re-focus more on workshops, in particular international workshops. So what does that mean? Let me give my personal view. Please use comment to express your standpoint! We can then hope to come to a common understanding about the direction of CEUR-WS.

So, a “truly international workshop” for me is a workshop where the participants and the program committee members come from a many different countries. One can argue what “many” means but you get the idea: the more the better. This avoids the creation of “bubbles” where local communities discuss scientific problems only with themselves. But I believe we need even more for a “truly international workshop”. I think that the participants (and PC members) should have a history to go to conferences/workshops in many different countries. They should get out of the “bubble” and expose their results to the scrutiny of an international audience.

The best way to achieve such a goal is probably to organize the workshop in collaboration with a well-known international conference. Of course, there are exceptions. We do not completely rule out conference proceedings. Our quality check may be a bit tougher for conferences but if the quality is very high, those proceedings are welcome! Likewise, workshops that are linked to a country and where most papers come from that country are not excluded. In such cases, the authors of papers should have a history to present their results on truly international events.

There has been a bit of an inflation of the term “international workshop/conference”. This dates back decades ago. The attribute “international” was meant to stress the importance of the event. I believe we should scale down the use of the word. If an event is local, then call it “national workshop” or just “workshop”. We shall anyway see from the composition of the accepted papers whether the submission is indeed international.

National events are great. They help young researchers to get experience. However, they should then also be published nationally. At least, the organizers should seriously consider this option. A publication with a national publisher is also accessible internationally. So, it is not lost. What may be more difficult is to get papers indexed in DBLP and SCOPUS. But that is only fair!

All researchers want to have their works visible as widely as possible. But then you need to put an extra effort to get your works published in highly visible outlets. And that is hard. It is poised to get harder on CEUR-WS.

Or what do you think?