FAQ

You can spend your precious time doing it yourself, hoping to successfully navigate the many pitfalls associated with running a technical conference, or you can hire a company that knows what they are doing and how to help you run your conference. This means there is a person behind the scenes, setting up, administering & supporting all users and operations. We quickly advise your Program Chairs about system flexibility and limitations, and let them promptly know when we spot timeline or procedural problems. We stay on top of your deadlines to make sure none of them slip, and manage all of the little nagging problems, most notably, dealing with delinquent authors and special request from the Program Committee. And because we have been working with conferences for such a long time, we have the long term memory of knowing how to do things right, what happened last year, or the year before that, tabulating and archiving all of your statistics, making sure you’re not re-inventing the wheel and making the same mistakes over & over, etc.

With a “self-service” solution you need to seriously consider:

• The time & resources required to learn how to setup & use the software (Learning curves can be very steep).
• The effort & time needed to attend to the many details of system usage, administration, support & management.
• Experience needed in conference management, publications prep & production, familiarity with IEEE policies & procedures (required form filings, Xplore compliance, etc).

Absolutely! We can configure the system to hide all author information from your reviewers and committee members, and yet still allow the Technical Program Chair to see this information, if you prefer. Please note that this option may incur some additional cost since we must check all submitted PDF files to make sure the authors did not include their identity on the submitted PDF file (before the start or your review process).

The design philosophy of Epapers is speed, simplicity & ease-of-use. Why? Because the task of peer reviewing papers is a volunteer activity, and you don’t need to be encumbered with complex software that is not intuitive or self-explanatory to use. The core prinicipals of Epapers’ design philosophy are:

1. Reviewers must be assigned to each paper manually (this is not an automatic process).
2. You must designate who will be responsible to make reviewer assignments. This will determine how we setup your review process in Epapers.
3. You can add reviewer names & email addresses into the system as assignments are made (on-the-fly), OR if you give us a list of all reviewer names & email addresses, we can pre-populate the reviewer database.
4. Epapers is an “opt-out” reviewer system. This means we do NOT wait for the reviewers approval before assignments are made.
5. The Epapers review system assumes that the person making the reviewer assignment, knows the reviewer PERSONALLY, and their field of expertise, and they are WILLING to perform reviews.
6. You do not need to add superfulous reviewer information such as area of specialty, max reviews allowed, willingness to review. This would only slow down the process.
7. Once you have added the reviewers name to the system, you can assign one or more papers with a couple of clicks.
8. The system sends an automatic email to the reviewer with instructions & log-in credentials.
9. Program Chairs can monitor review progress with various reports.
10. Your system administrator will monitor review activity and periodically broadcast reminders to all unfinished reviewers.

Yes. We provide the necessary forms & instructions as part of your Epapers solution. We receive all forms via email, fax or postal service. Then we convert them to PDF format for organized storage and tracking. We will chase all authors until every single copyright form is received. We make sure it is properly endorsed too.

We check for file compliance AFTER all final submissions have been received. Then we will chase authors that have submitted bad files to follow the posted instructions and submit a new file within 24 hours. If the author does not respond or chooses to ignore posted instructions, we will bring the file into compliance by any means necessary. Although this may sometimes corrupt their formatting, layout, etc. we will do our best to avoid this. But in the end, it is ALWAYS the authors responsibility to ensure their files are good and if we are forced to fix their problems we cannot guarantee it to meet the authors approval.

Yes, we can provide qualified clients access to our screen shot page. Please fill out our contact form.

Yes, we can provide access to our demo site for qualified clients. Please fill out our contact form.