Submission is one of the most common processes in academic and scientific events. Traditionally, the word “submission” was tied to receiving scientific papers, but today events also accept poems, photos, music, videos, banners, and other materials subject to evaluation. Managing submissions is a detailed task that requires careful organization.
Understanding Event Submissions
Event submission involves 6 main steps: submission/receipt, evaluation, review, results, presentation, and publication of proceedings. These steps can be done either manually or automatically. Here’s the best way to handle paper submissions at your event.
1. Submission
Done manually, organizers need to instruct participants to send their materials for evaluation by email or tools like Google Docs. Someone on the organizing committee then has to check receipt of the files and organize them in spreadsheets by category (abstract, review, paper, photo…) and subject area.
With an event platform, you can do all of this automatically in one place. On Even3, you can say goodbye to spreadsheets: there’s a dedicated submission module where participants fill out a form, submit their work, and track every following step — evaluation, review, and presentation.
2. Evaluation
How papers or activities will be evaluated needs to be defined in advance by the event organization. The ideal approach is to centralize all the work to be evaluated in one place and set clear evaluation criteria — all of which can be automated on Even3. This lets evaluators work faster, spares the organization from a manual task force (sending 500 emails), and lets participants track the evaluation of their work in real time.
3. Review
After being evaluated, papers can be approved, rejected, or approved with revisions. If organizers choose to handle this step manually, they need to be extremely careful: papers approved with revisions must go back to their authors for correction, and the organization has to send the material back and track the return deadline.
Today, you can do this automatically through a platform, making revised papers available to authors and setting a deadline for the corrected material to be returned for a new evaluation round.
4. Results
Time to announce the results! You can email the authors whose papers were approved, including guidelines and presentation dates. Doing this manually means building an email list or using email marketing tools to better filter who receives each message — which still takes time and effort. That’s why it’s best to use an event management system that automates this step for you.
5. Presentation
Fitting approved papers into rooms and time slots that make sense can be one of the most complicated tasks when building an event’s schedule. Done manually, there’s no way around the puzzle of matching topics to rooms and times. With an event system, everything gets easier: you can automatically distribute approved papers across strategic rooms and time slots, and participants can access this schedule information directly on the platform.
6. Publication of Proceedings
The best way to preserve everything your event generated is by publishing proceedings. All abstracts, papers presented, talks, and lectures are compiled into one larger body of content. Publishing proceedings is an excellent way to build your brand’s or event’s authority — and for participants, having a published paper in the proceedings adds real value to their résumé.
