CEUR-WS.org: Open-Access as a Community Effort

Conventional wisdom says that open-access (OA) publishing is not sustainable without a proper financial basis. Commercial OA publishers charge authors, their employers, or their roof organizations considerable fees to cover the costs and to generate income for the OA publishers. This may lead to undesired effects such as giving preference to authors who can afford the fee over those who do not have the resources.
CEUR-WS.org (CEUR Workshop Proceedings) selected a different path in 1995 when it was founded as a service operated under the umbrella of Sun SITE Central Europe ar RWTH Aachen University. We deliberately focussed on computer science workshop proceedings, which had difficulties to find publishers at that time. More importantly, we designed the service with a team of volunteer scientists who perform the publication service in their free time and without charging any fee from authors, editors, or readers.
Now, after more than 20 years, the service is still operating and growing every year. In the last year, we published more than 250 proceedings volumes, making CEUR-WS.org one of the largest open-access publication channels for computer science proceedings.
In this talk, we discuss the success factors of CEUR-WS.org and some of the challenges that we encountered over the past two decades. We also give some glimpses into future extensions of the service such as open data, semantification, and improved interoperability with neighbor services such as DBLP and the indexing by national libraries.
We believe that scientists should take a greater role in the publication value chain. We know best our needs for future publication models, the ethical conditions for fairness, and the rules governing scientific publication.
Many thanks go to the team of Sun SITE Central Europe for hosting the service and the members of the CEUR-WS.org Team who run the service for free, for you.