Preparing to chair a conference

Planning a conference is a very time consuming task. As chair, every aspect of the conference including its success or failure rests on your shoulders.

You may have an organising committee. You need to take their location into consideration. As one chair told us, although his committee were experienced and willing to help, at times it just wasn’t feasible. This was due to language and time zone differences. As such you should plan to manage the conference with little help and keep in mind that there are certain days you need to keep clear, in particular your submission & final drafts deadline day.

We’ve gathered some stats from our conferences and found that on average, if you have 85 days to accept submissions, 46% will come in on deadline day. This will coincide with numerous queries about word count, system queries & format.

Some Quick Tips:

1) Plan dates for opening and closing of:

• Submission
• Registration
• Final edits and copyright
• Reviewing

2) Set up a new email account: This should ease the communication problem if you do not have an online management system. Give access to you and other people who can assist you in administrative tasks. On deadline day, you will want to delegate the support queries.

3) Avoid repeating work: Prepare canned responses, you will get numerous identical queries and this will speed up the time it takes to respond.

4) Begin marketing early so authors can plan their research: This may help the influx of submission on deadline day. You can announce your call for papers on sites for free such as:

• Conferize (conferize.com)
• Conference Submit (conferencesubmit.com)
• Conference Alerts (conferencealerts.com)
• All Conferences (allconferences.com/New)
• EventSeer (eventseer.net)

Still have questions? Join us on LinkedIn to gain knowledge from other experienced conference organisers.

Happy Conferencing!

Issuing your call for papers

Issuing your call for papers is the first interaction you have with potential authors and delegates. Email may be the only form of contact you have with them for up to 9 months so it is crucial you keep the content engaging.

Ultimately, they need to be engaged enough to open your ‘Registration is open now’ mail and purchase a ticket. This stage comes relatively late in the conference, so if they are deleting your emails by this time it will impact on attendance.

How to get started

1)      Build your database of recipients:  At this point you should try to get their first and last name so you can personalise your emails.

2)      Plan:  Keep in mind you may have to send up to 3 reminders for your call for papers. One tip we give to clients is to hold back some keynote speakers in the first email. Then when you send reminders you can use the subject line “New Keynote Speaker Announced’ to spark attention”.

3)      Send and Track: It is important that you track the emails sent.  Attachments, images or spam reports could cause your emails to fail. – Meaning your emails may only have been sent half of the original number.  (More about this in next week’s blog.)

4)      Issue Reminders: In most cases, you will have to send at least one reminder, remember to keep this content engaging.

Still have questions? Join us on LinkedIn to gain knowledge from other experienced conference organisers.

P.S Here is a text template for you to use:

The Ex Ordo Conference 7^th June 2026

www.exordo.com

It is a pleasure to invite you to <Insert Conference Name>. The conference is organized by <Department & Organisation>.

<Brief History on Your Organisation/Conference>

We are delighted to announce <Name> will be attending our event as a speaker.

All contributors at the conference (both oral and poster presentations) are invited to submit a full-length scientific paper for a Special Issue of a selected journal after the conference.

<Topics>

We hope you will choose to attend the <Conference Name>!

Please register at  <Registration Site Address> to upload your extended abstracts.

Best regards,

Organizing Committee

Ex Ordo listed as a top solution for better events

The excellent Event Manager blog had this to say about Ex Ordo in a blog post called 10 Startups to help you run a better event.

“Ex Ordo brings order to what is usually a web mess: academic conference papers management. Having worked myself with this side of the business I would start using Ex Ordo immediately. It allows allocated reviewers to vote for abstracts, thus making the papers management seamless.”

Thanks guys – much appreciated!
Dermot.

Conference Announcement Sites

(Last update: Inomics, H-Net added – Sept 2012)

A few people have been in touch asking if we can create a single list of Conference Announcement sites that we’ve found – here goes.

First, an intro. Say you’re organising a research conference and are ready to invite abstract or papers. You have an internal mailing list but would like to invite a wider audience.  How do you increase the numbers of papers you receive and the delegates who attend your event?

One easy (and free!) way to do this is via a conference announcement site – a kind of dating service for research conferences. These are websites that allow organisers to upload details of their conference under relevant categories. Authors/delegates registered under these categories are then notified about your conference and can access your website for further information.

Here’s the list of sites that we’ve found. They are in no particular order, we add the most recent ones we find to the top.

Ex Ordo has no relationship with any of these sites. If you know of any others, please drop me a line and I’ll add them here as we go:

Announcement Sites for all Conferences

• H-Net (h-net.org/announce/submit1.cgi)
• Conferize (conferize.com)
• Conference Submit (conferencesubmit.com)
• Conference Alerts (conferencealerts.com)
• OurGlocal (ourglocal.com)
• Wikicfp (wikicfp.com)
• Lanyrd (lanyrd.com)
• ConferenceHound (conferencehound.com)
• BrownWalker (brownwalker.com/conferences/index.php)
• PRORCH (prorch.com)
• All Conferences (allconferences.com/New)
• EventSeer (eventseer.net)

Sites for Specific Fields

• Economics: Inomics (inomics.com)
• Health: Research Raven (researchraven.com)

Advice to a Research Student

Anthony Finkelstein’s @profserious blog has some great posts about research, engineering and life in general. One that we liked a lot was his Advice to Research Student – which has some helpful and quirky hints for students starting a research career.

Ex Ordo wins European Entrepreneurs Award in Finland

Hurrah! We scooped top prize at the European Business & Innovation Centre (EBN) Award, announced at a major conference in Finland last Friday.

The Kauffman FastTrac META Group European Entrepreneurs Award (phew!) is an initiative aimed at EU entrepreneurs who have recently established a high-growth potential start-up. The scope of the prize is to give relevance and support to the “best in class”, who can inspire the next generation of young entrepreneurs. The Kaufmann FastTrac program has served more than 300,000 entrepreneurs since 1993.

Paul accepting the European Entrepreneurs Award in Finland on Friday

For this award, entrepreneurs from all over Europe were vetted by an international selection committee composed of leading figures from the academic, business and investor communities. We were one of 3 companies to make the final shortlist.

On Friday, Paul and Tom travelled to Finland to pitch to an audience of 500+ delegates at the 21st European Business & Innovation Centre Network (EBN) Congress in Finland. And we won!

We’re thrilled and honoured to win this award. It’s another step on this amazing journey that we’re on. Plus we got to go to Finland – an amazing country! Thanks to the selection committee for choosing us, and thanks also to WESTBIC, The Galway County & City Enterprise Board and Enterprise Ireland for all their help & support along the way.

Tell the world about your Conference: Part 3

In our recent tell the World about your Conference, Part 1 and Part 2 posts, we listed some of the free websites that conference organisers can use to announce their conference and encourage greater participation. Here’s 2 more that we found recently:

PRORCH (www.prorch.com/) is launched by university professors who have organized many conferences and have published in many journals of repute. They have been members on editorial boards and experts of many journals. Their Experience inspired them to automate the whole process for the benefit of colleague researchers and conference organizers and journal publishers. This should help promote research by facilitating conference organizers and journal editors to focus their efforts in research dissemination rather than event management activities.

Brown Walker (www.brownwalker.com/conferences/index.php) conference announcement site allows organisers to add their events, and for participants to search for. It also includes an alert site to keep you upated on new events in your target area.

Tell the world about your conference! Part 2

In our recent, Tell the world about your conference! Part 1 post, we listed some of the free websites that conference organisers can use to announce their conference and encourage greater participation. Here’s some others:

ourGlocal

ourGlocal (www.ourglocal.com):

Sign-up to announce your conference and to receive notifications from conferences that interest you.

Research Raven

ResearchRaven (www.researchraven.com):

list calls for papers (for conferences as well as for periodicals) in the health sciences and the health-related social sciences and allied fields such as the medical humanities.

A Quick Guide to Writing a Solid Peer Review

Nicholas and Gordon’s paper “A Quick Guide to Writing a Solid Peer Review” summarises how to make the peer review approach as productive and efficient as possible.

Download a PDF of the paper published in EOS, Transactions, American Geophysical Union from David M Schultz’s eloquentscience.com blog here.

The Scientific Evolution: Open Science and the Future of Publishing

As part of their Open Science series, the University of Oxford hosted a debate on “The Evolution of Science: Open Publishing” in February 2012.

A distinguished group came together in Oxford’s Rhodes House to publicly debate ‘The Scientific Evolution: Open Science and the Future of Publishing’.

The diverse panel included publishers, funders, academics and entrepreneurs: Tim Gowers the Fields Medal winning mathematician, Victor Henning the co-founder and CEO of Mendeley, Robert Kiley from The Welcome Trust, Alison Mitchell from Nature Publishing Group, Cameron Neylon the open science activist and blogger, Lord Robert Winston the advocate of public engagement, and Alicia Wise from the publisher Elsevier. The event was organised by Victoria Watson and Simon Benjamin, and Simon also chaired it.

See the full debate on the University of Oxford’s website here.