The ConfIDent project ends this year. I therefore would like to give a short overview of what ConfIDent offers until now:
- You can use the search function on the homepage to look for specific academic events by entering its name or acronym. In addition, events in specific subject areas (e.g. Mobility Research) can be searched for and the results can be further filtered by event location. On the event page, even more filter options can be used.
- We offer detailed descriptions of academic events including information about the event’s start and end date, its location, its mode (in-person, hybrid or online), a link to its official website, its institutional organizer(s), the academic field and the event series it belongs to as well as deadlines. Links to related publications will follow soon. The information structure on our event pages is based on our metadata schema which in turn has its foundation in the Academic Event Ontology (AEON).
- We are minting DOIs for events (https://doi.org/10.25798/xdd0-sv05) and event series (https://doi.org/10.25798/pb04-fj24) and have provided user guidelines for using DataCite’s metadata schema for this purpose.
- The platform’s data can be reused in various formats via an export function. A detailed explanation of the export function can be found in our FAQ.
- Currently, mainly our curation team is creating new entries in ConfIDent. If you would like to see certain events indexed in ConfIDent, please send us an email to confident@tib.eu. We will then create the corresponding entries and register DOIs for them. Please be aware that we currently still do this manually and have limited capacities.
- All new events to be registered have to pass through our Predatory Identification Workflow before they are indexed in order to keep the platform as free of Predatory Conferences as possible.
- Until the end of this year, the technical requirements will be in place so that users will be able to create entries themselves. For this purpose, a moderation step will be implemented, with the help of which project staff can check new entries on the basis of the Predatory Identification Workflow.
In June 2022, we submitted the follow-up application for ConfIDent 2 to the DFG. We expect to receive a decision in the first quarter of 2023. This means that if we receive a positive response, the follow-up project will probably start in the 2nd quarter of 2023. These are the key points from our plan for the follow-up project:
- We want to build a community dedicated to developing appropriate indicators for assessing social responsibility and environmental sustainability in the context of scientific events.
- A recommendation tool will be developed to better support especially early career researchers in their search for events.
- To improve the richness and timeliness of the data, we plan to create a connection between ConfIDent and conference management tools. Organizers should be able to automatically create entries in ConfIDent by using the information collected by the conference management tool they use. In addition, data exchange with systems such as conference calendars of learned societies or research information systems will be enhanced.
- The metadata schema elaborated in the first project phase will be further developed towards a standard for descriptions of scientific events in consultation with the stakeholders concerned. Interoperability with existing systems and harmonization of discipline-specific requirements are the focus of further development.
- New approaches are being developed to better disambiguate and link the large amounts of existing event data.
- Since there is a great demand for information about the persons connected with a conference (committee members, speakers, etc.), we are working on a GDPR-compliant solution to integrate this information.
For any questions or comments feel free to contact us at confiden@tib.eu. Independent of the success of the follow-up proposal ConfIDent will of course be further maintained.