Peer-reviewed abstract and paper at different dates

[schiette]

Dear OCS forum,

I’m organising a conference with the following peculiar timeline: Abstract are submitted a few months in advance of the conference. These abstracts are reviewed by a program committee, and the authors of the accepted abstracts that finally attend the conference are allowed to submit an article before the first day of the conference for the peer-reviewed proceedings. These proceedings are published in a journal in our field. We have to carry out the peer-review of the proceeding articles and usually rely on many of the attendees as referees. They are assigned articles to review during day 1 so they can attend the related presentation. Some enthusiastic authors can submit several abstracts, one typically accepted for an oral presentation and a couple of others accepted for poster presentations, so we need a mechanism to identify which proceeding article goes with what presentation.

I’ve seen from the workflow chart that OCS can be used to publish refereed proceedings so I installed and played around with OCS, read the documentation and forums. I realize that OCS perfectly manages all the abstract review process and can be used to carry out article review but it seems to me that it implies that the article is submitted at the same time as the abstract if we want them to pass as a “pair” (one abstract=one potential proceedings article) through the review process, and that only one review process per conference is possible. (Note that the abstact reviewers are not the same as the article reviewers.)

A way around would be to configure two concurrent instances of the same conference, one where the authors can submit abstracts, register for the conference, see the schedule and so on, and another where they can submit an article (as a full proposal, with different start and end dates) so we can check at least on an author-by-author basis that people who submitted an article in the second instance of the conference had their abstract accepted for an oral presentation or poster in the first instance of the conference. Not a perfect solution, but I’m especially afraid that this kind of complication will confuse users. I guess that we can minimize this confusion by designing very simplified custom blocks that link between the “real conference” and the “article submission conference”.

Is there another way around? Did I miss something?

Sorry for the long post and thanks for this great application!