About the Cryptology ePrint Archive

Goal

The Cryptology ePrint Archive provides rapid access to recent research in cryptology. Papers have been placed here by the authors and did not undergo any refereeing process other than verifying that the work seems to be within the scope of cryptology and meets some minimal acceptance criteria. This page also describes the operation, the licensing conditions, and the rules about further publication.

Operation

The Cryptology ePrint Archive operates as follows:

any author can submit a paper with a technical contribution in the field of cryptology;
submissions are reviewed by the editors, who will accept or reject submissions based on criteria discussed below;
email notification of acceptance or rejection is sent to the email address provided by the submitter;
if the submission is accepted, the email notification contains a password that the submitter should preserve, since it allows later revisions;
using the password, a submitter can revise their paper, can add comments on the further history of the paper (such as a reference to later publication in a journal or conference, or to a new paper subsuming this work), and so on (but the archive always keeps and displays also the previous versions);
using the password, a submitter can withdraw their paper (but the archive always keeps the title and abstract of the paper, as well as any past versions);
once withdrawn, a paper cannot be resurrected; re-submissions of withdrawn papers will not be accepted.

The interface is automated: retrieval, submission, and revisions are done by scripts on the server. Authors are fully responsible for the content of posted work, including copyright. Neither the archive operators nor the IACR takes any responsibility in that matter.

Acceptance Criteria

All submissions that are deemed by the editors to

fall in the field of cryptology,
be clear and readable,
look somewhat new and interesting,
contain proofs or convincing arguments for any claims

will be accepted and included in the archive.

Note that if a paper is accepted, then this does not mean that the editors have verified any claims or arguments. Authors are solely responsible for the content and the correctness of the published work.

Submissions must not be anonymous and state title, author name(s), and a contact address or affiliation(s) on the first page.

Licensing Conditions

Submission of an article to the Cryptology ePrint Archive implies that

the authors grant IACR a non-exclusive and irrevocable license to distribute the article under the CC BY (creative commons attribution) license;
or — by stating this in a footnote on the first page of the article — the authors grant IACR a non-exclusive and irrevocable license to distribute the article under the CC BY-NC (creative commons attribution-noncommercial) license;
the authors certify that they have the right to grant this license;
the authors are aware that publications cannot be completely removed once accepted.

In the most common case authors have the right to grant this license because they hold the copyright in their own work. Note that if authors intend to submit, or have submitted, an article to a journal or another publication venue, then the authors are responsible for verifying that the selected license does not conflict with the license or copyright transfer agreement of the other publication. The IACR copyright and publication policy used for IACR's conference and journal publications permits and encourages that authors submit their work to the Cryptology ePrint Archive.

Further Publication

Posting a paper to the Cryptology ePrint Archive does not prevent future or concurrent submission to any journal or conference with proceedings: the papers in the Cryptology ePrint Archive have the status of technical reports in this respect.

Papers submitted may be author versions of published papers if the copyright holder allows such posting. This is typically called Green Open-Access publishing or Open-Access Self-Archiving. It is the authors' responsibility to ensure that they have permission of the copyright holder to submit such papers to the Cryptology ePrint Archive.

In particular this implies that all author versions of IACR proceedings papers may be posted to the Cryptology ePrint Archive for all IACR conferences and workshops from 2013 onward. In the IACR copyright form such author versions are called IACR versions.

Revised and Withdrawn Papers

The archive actively discourages that different versions of essentially the same material are posted as multiple, distinct papers. Instead authors should revise existing reports.

Authors may themselves revise their papers in the archive; the most recent version of a report is shown first by the archive. However, all previous versions are stored internally and can be retrieved through the interface. (This includes past versions of all reports since the start of the archive in 2000.) Information about further publication of every version should be given.

Similarly, for papers that have been withdrawn, the previous versions remain accessible. The aim of making previous versions available is to create transparency and an accurate historical record. It thereby mimics features of "publications" in the paper age; if removals or retrospective changes were implemented, then the archive would not be considered a publication.

Discussion Forum

The discussion forum has been introduced in 2007. Readers and authors can discuss papers there. The forum is unmoderated, but requires registration with a valid email address for posting messages. The moderator(s) will occasionally check that the posted messages respect the scope of the archive; messages violating the rules of the Cryptology ePrint Archive, in particular messages of insulting nature, will be removed.

How to Cite a Paper in the Cryptology ePrint Archive

The Cryptology ePrint Archive is accessible at http://eprint.iacr.org/.

In BibTeX, a paper is cited as follows:

@misc{AuthorBeliever1990,
   author       = {Alice Author and Bob Believer},
   title        = {A New Unbreakable Cryptosystem},
   howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 1990/001},
   year         = {1990},
   note         = {\url{http://eprint.iacr.org/}},
}

Click on the BibTeX Citation link next to the PS or PDF link to automatically generate this.

If you want to link directly to this paper, please use an URL like

http://eprint.iacr.org/1990/001

If you want to link directly to a specific version of a paper, please use an URL like

http://eprint.iacr.org/1990/001/19900101:145711

The URL of every version is displayed on report page that shows the metadata. We cannot guarantee that such URLs will last as long as printed references, however.

History

The Cryptology ePrint Archive was started by IACR in 2000. IACR took up an initiative of Eli Biham and Christian Cachin, who later joined forces with Mihir Bellare and Bennet Yee for setting up the operation.

The Cryptology ePrint Archive replaces the Theory of Cryptology Library, located previously at http://philby.ucsd.edu, an early preprint server for cryptology started by Oded Goldreich in 1996 and later maintained by Mihir Bellare and Bennet Yee at UCSD. The 1996-1999 contents of the Theory of Cryptology Library have been automatically included in the Cryptology ePrint Archive for the years prior to 2000.

For more information, read the proposal by Eli Biham and Christian Cachin that lead to the establishment of the IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive (in Postscript, gzipped Postscript, or PDF format).

On Anonymous Conference Submissions

Numerous conferences (eg. Crypto, Eurocrypt, Asiacrypt, CCS, PKC, Security & Privacy) currently require submissions to be anonymous. This might raise the question of whether or not it is appropriate for authors to put on the ePrint archive a paper which is submitted, or will later be submitted, to a conference requiring anonymous submissions. The view of IACR and the ePrint archive is that such a posting is permitted and that authors should not be penalized by conference program committees for having made such a posting. If a conference feels that it does not want submissions to be posted prior to submission, it is up to the conference to make this clear and explicit in their call for papers. Currently, however, calls for papers state rules regarding anonymity of submissions but do not state any requirements on exposure of the submissions via alternative forums. Indeed, there exist numerous ways of widely announcing a new result, including posting on a personal web-page, email, talks, and discussions with colleagues, and the ePrint archive provides just another way to do this. This reflects IACR's goals and policies as confirmed by the IACR Board of Directors' meeting on May 2, 1999 in Prague:

It was ensured that authors are allowed to announce their results in public when they are in an anonymous refereeing process, that they can tell (and give away papers to) colleagues who work on similar matters and should know about an author's results. If an author announces a result widely, and committee members are on the distribution list, they should not be removed just because the paper is in submission. Authors are allowed to give talks on their papers and submit them to existing preprint servers, which will usually be announced widely. On the other hand, it is not intended that a submitter send letters to all the committee members saying who wrote which paper. Anonymous submission just means that papers are submitted without author's names and too obvious references.

For more information, read the proposal by Eli Biham and Christian Cachin for IACR (in Postscript, gzipped Postscript, or PDF format).

Why the Name?

The name Cryptology ePrint Archive reflects the features of this form of publication: electronically distributed, rapidly published, recent work, immediately accessible. It is different from other forms of scientific publishing because work is placed here by the authors an undergoes almost no refereeing.

Other Preprint Archives

[ Cryptology ePrint Archive ]