Background: After going solo, the CCC conference is using LIPIcs as a “publisher” for the papers accepted to the conference. This involves a non-trivial amount of formatting (to put the papers in their format) and also some monetary costs.
I would like to use the opportunity that CCC is going solo to move to a model where the “publishing” involves *zero* effort from authors. This could be a selling point for the conference, and maybe set an example for others.
Specifically, in the vein of previous posts, I propose that authors of accepted papers simply send the .pdf of their paper in whatever format they like. The CCC people take care of placing a stamp “CCC 20xx camera-ready” and putting the paper on the ECCC. Papers with indecent formatting are treated exactly as papers with indecent introductions.
Disclaimer: although I am on the reviewing board of ECCC I had no discussions with the ECCC people about this.
The main benefits of ECCC are:
– Submission is painless: just send the .pdf! Again, authors can write their paper in whatever format they like.
– Indexed by DBLP
– It’s run by “us”, it’s about computational complexity and in fact “Under the auspices of the Computational Complexity Foundation (CCF)”
– It has an ISSN number (1433-8092). I am told this is important for some institutions, though I don’t know if some insist on ISBN over ISSN. If they do, perhaps there’s a way to get that too?
– They do various nice things already, like archiving papers in CD’s etc. In fact, going back to the ISBN issue, couldn’t we simply assign an ISBN to the reports from each year?
– It has no cost (given that ECCC already exists).
Another option is to use arxiv or an arxiv overlay. This would also be better than using LIPIcs, I think, but it does not enjoy many of the benefits above.
Thoughts 