
In a conference, among other things, one of the many important jobs of the chair committee is to launch the call for papers, collect proposals and abstracts, assign them to reviewers and manage each and every task involved in the abstract management workflow. There are two workflows a conference organizer would choose from when opening a call for abstract submissions.
Manual abstract management : The manual process of collecting abstracts through email, then forwarding these emails to prospective reviewers who would eventually review these abstracts. Reviewers would then email these reviews to the track chair. Track chair sends an email requesting authors to revise the abstracts, if needed. Finally, the chair would make decision on the abstracts and send another email to convey authors of their decision. Authors would then confirm their attendance by paying the registration fee or by sending yet another email to confirm their participation.
Every step is a manual task which requires a lot of work hours and multiple staff to manage the complete workflow. And if you made a mistake in any of the steps during the submission process, it would not be very forgiving and would make you redo all previous steps making the whole process cumbersome and inefficient.
However, there’s a better alternative.
Automated abstract management : An abstract management system automates these steps, from author invites to abstract submission, abstract assignment to review submission, abstract revision to decision making, automated email notifications to generating abstract books out of the submitted abstracts, auto-populating the program schedule with accepted abstracts to creating a PDF copy of the program schedule and virtually every other task involved in the call for papers process, resulting in huge savings in terms of time and effort.
Dryfta abstract management system enables the chair committee to either set up a straightforward submission process to submit papers or a complex submission process with multi-level, multi-track abstract submission, and review workflow.