Standard User Roles

ConfTool User

Every person registered with the ConfTool system is a ConfTool user. An user account is necessary to access any facility of the system. At time of registration, the user has no particular status, i.e., he is neither participant, author nor reviewer.

Author

Every user who submits a contribution in ConfTool gets the status author. He can access his contribution, revise his submission until the deadline and after the review phase he has also access to the results of the reviews. Finally he is able to submit the final version, if his contribution was accepted.

Coauthor [ConfTool Pro]

If an author of a submission lists the e-mail address of his coauthors and these are already registered ConfTool users, the corresponding users automatically get the status coauthor in ConfTool Pro. This makes it easier to find out, where reviewers might have conflicts of interest. Coauthors may also access their submissions and will get copies of e-mails sent to the authors of contributions, for example those about the notification of acceptance.

Presenter [ConfTool Pro]

The submitting author (no the coauthors) of an accepted contribution is listed as presenter in ConfTool Pro unless another author of  this submission has been determined explicitly as presenter. This allows you to check which presenters are already registered for conference participation.

Participant

Every user who registers for conference participation in ConfTool gets the status participant. He can for instance access his invoice and payment status.

Reviewer [ConfTool Pro]

Reviewers can access, download and review contributions that were assigned to them. They are supposed to enter their review results in an online form.

Reviewers also have access to the "bidding for papers" function, where they can indicate, which contributions they would like or not like to review. They can also state personal conflicts of interest to prevent submissions of affiliated authors being assigned to them.

Member of the Program Committee (PC Member)

Program Committee Members also enter reviews and bid for papers like reviewers.

Furthermore, they have (in contrast to reviewers) access to the discussion forum of ConfTool Pro. Here they get an overview of all contributions with the review results in order to discuss online and to vote for or against acceptance. Papers with personal conflict of interest are not shown.

Meta Reviewer [ConfTool Pro]

Meta reviewers are expert reviewers who have access to all other reviews of those submissions they were assigned to. They can also see who was also assigned to review the corresponding submissions.

Usually their role is to summarize the reviews of the other reviewers and to supervise the review process of these contributions. They can for instance remind the other reviewers of their duties, if their review is late or too superficial.

Therefore, meta reviewers have access to all other reviews of the submissions assigned to them. In addition to that names and e-mails of other reviewers may be displayed in order to give the meta reviewers the opportunity to contact these reviewers.

You have to enable Meta-Reviews in the Main Setup to use this option in ConfTool Pro.

Users with Administrative Rights

Conference Administrator (Admin)

A user with the status Conference Administrator (Admin) has full access to all parts of ConfTool.

He can log in as any other user. This is sometimes useful to assist other users and to test the settings of your ConfTool installation. Moreover, he can create new user accounts with administrative rights.

Conference Assistant (Assist) [ConfTool Pro]

The Conference Assistant (Assist) plays an important role for the participant registration and the processing of payments.

He has access to all users, can create new users (e.g. reviewers), and register users for conference participation. Furthermore, he can access the registration and billing data of all participants and enter the payments that were received.

The assistant can also send bulk mails and export user and participant data, e.g. to create badges or the list of participants.

The assistant has no access to submissions and reviews.

Chair of the Program Committee (Chair) [ConfTool Pro]

The Chair has access to all submissions, all reviewers and all review results. He can also manually assign contributions to the reviewers and decide which papers are accepted and which are not.

Additional options of chairs may be configured in the user settings.

Conference Chair (ConfChair) [ConfTool Pro]

The Conference Chair (ConfChair) has the same options as the program committee Chair, but he can also access the user and participant management. He can create new users, send bulk mails and export data related to the submission process.

However, the Conference Chair has no access to payment details and the ConfTool setting.

Front Desk / Registration / Student Volunteer (FrontDesk)

The Front Desk user has access to all users and participants stored in ConfTool. This status is often used for people who work at the registration desk only (like student volunteers).

They have access to the list of all users and also all participants including their invoices. They have (per default) no access to payment details, like credit card data. This is restricted to assistants and administrators.

They can note the arrival of participants in ConfTool and store if they want to appear on the official list of participants and if they signed the participation confirmation form (useful if they haven't paid, yet).