Is there any reason why you can't put those jars into ear/lib ?

This will make them availble to the whole application. Non ejb-jars (i.e. jars without EJB component defiining annotations or listed as an ejb-jar in application.xml) in the root of the appplication will not be deployed by default (this is per the EE6 platform spec), if you want to leave them where they are you must list them as Class-Path entries in the manifest of any class that wants to use them, which sounds impractical for your case.

It's easy enough to get maven to generate manifest classpath entries:

{code:xml}            <plugin>
                <artifactId>maven-jar-plugin</artifactId>
                <configuration>
                    <archive>
                        <manifest>
                            <addClasspath>true</addClasspath>
                        </manifest>
                    </archive>
                </configuration>
            </plugin>{code}

but I agree with Stuart. Moving library jars to the EAR/lib directory is much more manageable.

Also, the current maven-ear-plugin is pretty good at assembling correct EAR files this way too:

{code:xml}           <plugin>
                <artifactId>maven-ear-plugin</artifactId>
                <configuration>
                    <version>6</version>
                    <generateApplicationXml>true</generateApplicationXml>
                    <defaultLibBundleDir>lib</defaultLibBundleDir>
                    <skinnyWars>true</skinnyWars>
                    <modules>
                        <webModule>
                            <groupId>${project.groupId}</groupId>
                            <artifactId>...</artifactId>
                            <contextRoot>...</contextRoot>
                        </webModule>
                        <webModule>
                            <groupId>${project.groupId}</groupId>
                            ...
                        </webModule>
                        <ejbModule>
                            <groupId>${project.groupId}</groupId>
                            <artifactId>...</artifactId>
                        </ejbModule>
                    </modules>
                </configuration>
            </plugin>{code}