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Do new users have to "validate their e-mail" to use ConfTool Pro? What are the consequences of validation?

Validating the mail address is optional in ConfTool Pro. Users without validated mail address can also use the system, submit papers, do reviews and register for participation.

They will also receive confirmation mails and mails if you use the bulk mail function.

However, validating their e-mail address gives them read access to the submissions where they are listed as Co-Authors with their e-mail address. Furthermore, these papers also get listed on the confirmation for participation and the invitation letter.

Category: General

When I print a page from ConfTool the background colors disappear. How can I change this?

Please go to the print settings of your browser, there you can enable “Print background colors” (works for both, Firefox and Internet Explorer).

Category: General

How do I find out how many of the bulk mails sent via ConfTool were received and read by the recipients?

There is no reliable way to verify which e-mails have been received by the recipient, and you can never know who read a mail or not. In fact e-mails are comparable with postcards: they are not save, may get lost and people tend to ignore them.

However, if an e-mail was dispatched perfectly (no error message by the ConfTool system was indicated) and you get no warning e-mail back, the likelihood is as high as with any other e-mail that the mail will be been received by the recipients.

Category: General

How do I edit or delete users?

Please go to  List of Users and click on “Edit” or “Delete” in the right column.

Category: General

I get an error message when I try to delete a user.

Please note that you can / should only delete users that are not “active” in the system any more, i.e., you have to withdraw the submissions of these persons first  (if there are any), delete their reviews (if reviews were assigned to them) and cancel their registration for participation.

Furthermore, users are only marked as “deleted” in the system, so you can undo this operation if required. If you want to remove all deleted users from ConfTool, please log in as Admin, go to “User Management” and select “Purge Deleted Users” (the page ID is “adminUsersPurge” if the link does not exisit in your version).

Category: General

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What is a Meta Review in ConfTool Pro?

Meta Reviewers have access to the reviews and reviewer names of their co-reviewers (the other persons inspecting the same submission). They can, for instance, supervise the review process for one paper or summarize the reviews of the other reviewers. You can assign one or several meta reviewers to each paper.

Category: Submission and Review Process

I have managed to negotiate the review process for papers. I am at the stage of deciding what papers are to be accepted. I note I can of course select this for each paper based on the review results but I don’t see how I notify authors of acceptance.

There are no automatic mails sent when you set the acceptance status, as many chairs have to update their decisions during the program scheduling process for some papers, depending on the available sessions times and slots.

Please have a look at this documentation page to see how you can set the acceptance status:

www.conftool.net/en/administrator_documentation/set_acceptance_status.html

To inform the authors, please use the bulk mail function of ConfTool:

www.conftool.net/en/administrator_documentation/bulk_e_mails.html

Category: Submission and Review Process

When I assign reviews, what does the option “set conflict” do and how do I use it?

If you set a conflict, this reviewer will not be considered during the automatic review assignment process and she/he will also not be able to access the corresponding submission in the “pc online forum” of ConfTool Pro.

Category: Submission and Review Process

How do I edit or delete submissions?

Please go to the List of Submissions and click on “Edit” or “Withdraw” in the right column.

You can always undo the withdrawl of a paper, if it was done in error: go to the List of Submissions, enable the "Filter Options" and select to "show withdrawn submissions". They now appear in the list below and in the right column you find the link to "undelete" the paper.

Category: Submission and Review Process

Can authors edit the submission type / conference track of their submissions?

No they can’t, as often different submission types or tracks have different requirements and deadlines. But you can edit this if you click on “Edit” in the list of submissions.

Category: Submission and Review Process

How can I export all abstracts for the printed conference program?

There are several options, the “best way” depends on your exact requirements. Please have a look at the options below and choose your favorite way to export the submissions:

1. Go to the “List of Submissions” and select the submission type you want to export. Set the number of displayed items per page to “All”, set “Select Version” to “List all abstracts…” to display abstracts at once.
   If you enable the “print view” now, you can select and copy the whole page (type STRG-A and STRG-C) in your browser and paste it to e.g. Microsoft Word, to edit these submissions.
   Please use Internet Explorer to copy the text from ConfTool. Firefox and other browsers have problems to copy formatted text.
2. Go to “Conference and Programme Scheduling” and select “Edit the Conference Schedule”. Here you can select the papers by session. Please enable “Show abstracts” and enable the “Print View” and you get a formatted overview of the corresponding abstract with title, authors and organizations. Again use the Internet Explorer to cut the text and paste it to word for further processing.
3. You can also use the ConfTool export functions to export all contributions with abstracts. Please create a serial letter to Format authors, organizations and abstracts the way you need them.
4. If users have uploaded the abstracts as PDF or DOC-Files, you have to use these files for your proceedings instead. We provide an instruction on how to download all submissions in one go here: www.conftool.net/en/administrator_documentation/downloading_multiple_files.html

Category: Submission and Review Process

Is there some kind of automatic acceptance process based on percentage? For instance, can I set a limit for "accepted" papers to 70% and every paper with this score or higher will be automatically marked as accepted?

There is no automatic function, to accept certain papers automatically, as usually not only the total score is considered when the conference committee decides about acceptance.

But if you use ConfTool Pro and you have many papers and would like to save time, you may contact us and we can set all papers with a certain score to “accepted” or “rejected”.

Category: Submission and Review Process

Can authors see the names of the reviewers?

The reviewers’ names are not revealed to the authors.
Exception: If you use the “Open Review” setting of ConfTool Pro, you can also display the reviewers' names to the authors (if required), but for the open review process all submissions and reviews are open to the public anyway.

Category: Submission and Review Process

Can reviewers see the authors' names?

This depends on the configuration of the submission type / conference track. Per default authors are not shown to the reviewers, but you can disable the “double blind” review by submission type / conference track, and display the authors' names and organizations to the reviewers.
Please note that file names are always renamed to a generic scheme (e.g. “Contribution_100.pdf”) for the reviewers, but the contents of the files are of course not altered! So if you need anonymized (for the review process) and “normal” submissions (for publication), you can also ask for two file uploads for each submission and disable the access of reviewers of the non-anonymized files.

Category: Submission and Review Process

When talking about reviews, what exactly stands for the term "bidding"?

You can use this to allow reviewers to select their preferred papers, before you assign the submissions to them for reviewing. It's optional, especially bigger conferences use it, but we recommend to offer such a “bidding phase” also for smaller events.

Category: Submission and Review Process

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If someone registers for our event and wants to present 3 papers, he definitely will have to pay 3 times the registration fees! Does it mean, that he also has to register 3 times in ConfTool?

No, the number of papers submitted papers and the fees are not related. Furthermore, if a person submits two papers, this does not mean that two papers get accepted or will be presented.

We suggest to handle such fees by adding an extra option “extra paper submission fee” to the participant registration form with an according fee for each extra submission, but still such cases have to be verified manually.

Please note that you can also limit the number of submissions per user in ConfTool Pro.

Category: Participant Registration Handling

If a co-author of paper wants to participate and also wants to co-present it with the main author, does he have to register (and pay)?

That depends on how you handle it, you are the organizer. Usually every person who attends an event has to pay a participation fee.

 

Category: Participant Registration Handling

How do I enter payments in ConfTool Pro?

Please go to the list of participants, search for the corresponding registration and click on “Payments” in the right column. Here you can enter any payment amount. Hint: If a fee was deducted by the credit card company or bank, please enter the full payment of the participant, as banking costs are usually covered by the organizers.

Category: Participant Registration Handling

How can participants edit their registration?

Usually this is not enabled, as the registration is binding and deselecting or changing options after the registration may change the fees or these participants or might be problematic for the organizers.

If you are sure that you still require this, please contact us and we enable the editing of registrations for your ConfTool Pro installation. You can chose for each event / item group if events of the group may be changed, added or are only displayed.

 

Category: Participant Registration Handling

How can I edit the registration of a participant?

Please go to the list of Participants and click on “edit” in the right column.

Category: Participant Registration Handling

How do participants cancel their registration?

Participants (usually) cannot cancel their registration, they have to contact the organizers. (This feature can also be enabled if you contact us, but is usually only advisable for events without participation fees.)

Category: Participant Registration Handling

How do I remove the status "participant" / cancel a registration for participation and what do I have to consider?

Please go to the List of Participants and click on “Cancel” in the right column. You have four options to cancel a participation as listed on the next screen (with cancellation fees, without fees etc.). Please use the appropriate option.

Please consider that:

• participants usually have to pay a service fee if they want to cancel their registration as stated in the registration terms of your event.
• if the participant has already paid the participation fee, his payment has to be (partially) refunded. Please click on "Payments" in the right column to create a payment refund in ConfTool.
• you have already issued an invoice for this participant, therefore you might have to consider this action in your bookkeeping, too.

Category: Participant Registration Handling

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How do I set up the system?

Please log-in as a user with administrative rights and go to “Settings”.  Start at the top of the settings page with the first configuration option. All configuration pages have to be checked and completed, but, for instance, if you start the registration for participation later, you can skip this section for now.

If you don’t understand the purpose of a setting, it’s usually safe to keep the default setting.

After setup create test user accounts and ask other organizers to test the configuration, by doing test submissions and/or test registrations. You can withdraw / cancel / delete this data later.

Category: Configuration: General

What is the use of the option "Wordings and Phrases"?

Here you can change all text labels of the system. This feature is mainly for advanced users, and please test any changes. Most wordings in the system have been chosen with consideration, so please think twice before you change anything!

Category: Configuration: General

I have changed a ConfTool setting / a text in "Wordings and Phrases", but the update has no effect on the corresponding page.

All settings have immediate effect, however, the system buffers many settings for each user for performance reasons. 

So if you use two browsers (e.g. Internet Explorer as admin and Firefox as normal user) at the same time to use the system with two user accounts, you have to log-out and in again from ConfTool in your second browser window to see the updates.

Category: Configuration: General

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Conference track / type of submission - what is a track?

Track is a term for (bigger) conferences that are separated into several thematic areas and have (usually) dedicated chairs and program committees for each track. Other common terms for “track” are “stream”, “strand”, “area”, and “network”.

Category: Configuration: Submissions and Reviews

Why are the uploaded files not displayed on the conference agenda pages?

Please check  the following settings:

• For each “conference track /submission type” scroll down to “Download Options”. Here you can set the “Accessibility of File” 1 to 3.
• For each session you enable and disable the access to the entered abstracts and the uploaded files. Go to “Conference Programme Scheduling” and “Create, Configure and Delete Sessions” to change the setting for each session, if required.

Category: Configuration: Submissions and Reviews

The “final upload” feature does not work, authors cannot upload their final version. Why?

Please check the following options:

• Are the global deadlines (start and end date!) correctly set?
• Is the deadline for the corresponding track correctly set?
• Did you set the acceptance status for this submission? Final uploads are (normally) only enabled for accepted submissions.
• Is the final upload enabled for the corresponding acceptance status? It is enabled as standard for all “accepted” statuses, but this can be changed.
• Is the person the main author? Co-authors have only read access to the submissions.

Category: Configuration: Submissions and Reviews

I enabled the feature to send an e-mail notification to the corresponding authors if a new review is entered. However, they do not receive any messages. Why?

• Please check the e-mail settings again. The option “Want to send an e-mail to the authors of the reviewed contribution?” has to be set to “Yes”.
• Authors will only receive a message if the review results are already visible to the authors, otherwise this message would be confusing (“I get a mail about a new review but cannot see any review…”). Please see above if you have problems to enable the review results for authors.

Category: Configuration: Submissions and Reviews

Why are the review results not displayed to the authors?

Please check the following settings:

• Did you enable the corresponding “phase and deadline” called “Results of the reviewing procedures are accessible to authors”?
• Please check if you set an alternative publication date for any of the conference tracks / contribution types.
• Please note that authors can only access the results if a decision has been made, i.e., the acceptance status is not “on hold” any more.
• Please check if the  review results are enabled for the corresponding acceptance statuses (it is by default for all statuses, but not “on hold”). Please go to „settings“ => „manage acceptance status“ to access the configuration. The setting is called “Show Results”. Please note that you can also display the results for the status “on hold” if required.

Category: Configuration: Submissions and Reviews

Why can’t the reviewers access the uploaded files?

With the default settings, reviewers can access all uploaded files. However, you can change the “download options” for each “Submission Type / Conference Track” on the corresponding page under “Settings”. The option is called “Accessibility of File X”: Here you can select if reviewers can access the file. Later the same setting can be used to determine if uploaded files can be downloaded from the conference agenda pages.

Category: Configuration: Submissions and Reviews

I want participants to submit an abstract using the online form without the possibility to upload a file. Later they have to submit their full paper. Is that possible?

Yes, if you use ConfTool Pro. Just go to “Settings” => “Conference Tracks / Contribution Types”) and set the number of uploads to “0” for the corresponding tracks. 

If you have a three-phase submission process with abstracts submission and review, then full paper submission and reviewing and finally the final paper (camera ready copy) submission, this can be handled with ConfTool Pro if you contact us after the abstract submission phase. We will then convert all accepted abstracts to full papers for a full paper submission phase. By doing this you keep all abstracts and reviews for later reference.

Category: Configuration: Submissions and Reviews

I understand that, but where should I upload our template, so every participant can download it?

Please upload the template file to your main website and link to it on your “information for submitting authors” page. You can  add a link to this page in the text "Submission Details" of your “Conference Track / Submission Type” if you use HTML:
Example: "Please consider our <a target="_blank" href="www.example.edutemplate.dot">template</a> for your submission.

See also: www.conftool.net/en/administrator_documentation/html_basics.html

Category: Configuration: Submissions and Reviews

How and where do I define the format (size and font type for title, fonts for tables, fonts for normal text etc.) for full paper submissions?

Please use your “call for papers” / “information for submitting authors” page on your main Website and provide the instructions and a template for your authors there. Such templates are not defined in ConfTool.
Please note that there are some tools to automatically check basic attributes of PDF files, but the options of these tools are quite limited and they do not prevent you from checking all submissions before publication anyway. As they are quite slow and the output is rarely helpful, we decided  not to integrate them in ConfTool.

Category: Configuration: Submissions and Reviews

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How do I deal with options which are “for free” or “included” like conference workshops or sessions/tracks if we want to estimate the number of persons who will come to a certain session?

You can add as many options to the participant registration form as you like. You can also add options without costs under “Manage Events and Items”. Just select “No fee” as price category.

Furthermore, we recommend to create a separate Event / Item Group for such selections (maybe “Preferred Sessions on Monday”) and set the option “Events without price” to “Hide events/items of this group on invoice on receipt” for this group.

Category: Configuration: Participant Registration

When users try to register, they get an error message saying that the configuration is not set up correctly, but I have enabled the participant registration phase!

You have to define the different options and prices of the registration form, before you can enable the registration for participation. Go to settings and complete all menus below: “Settings for the Participant Management of ConfTool”. Please note that the items of the registration form are defined on the pages:

• “Manage Event/Item Groups” creates the different sections of the form while
• “Manage Events and Items” is used to define the options.

Category: Configuration: Participant Registration