One of the lessons we’ve taken from our sister-society ESMAC, is that in today’s digital age, it’s often easier once abstracts are accepted to let the authors put in their own updates prior to the conference. Why allow updates to begin with? For one thing, often the presenter changes, or people notice misspellings of names, titles, or other things. Occasionally, there are typos that need correcting.

In this year’s case, some folks are putting DOIs into their references so that we can actually register their abstracts with CrossRef. They have a pesky rule that says that current works (this year – 2 years) have to have the DOIs listed to be compliant with CrossRef standards. It’s actually a good rule because it means that people can find the work you’ve referenced by clicking on a link. But it really does make it easier if YOU make the change instead of asking me to make it later on. Editing PDFs is a black art at best.

So given that you want to update your abstract, how do you go about doing this? Make whatever changes you need to your document and then convert it to a PDF. Then go to our OpenConf website, and use your submission ID to login.

You might be tempted to go to “Edit Submission”, but you can’t actually upload a new file from there. If you do wish to update some of the meta information, you can change most of it (not the title) from the “Edit Submission” page. For some reason, OpenConf won’t let you change the title.

As the person who will be concatenating this all over the next few weeks, to me the important thing is your actual PDF. If that is correct, then all is well, since that will be what is ultimately indexed by CrossRef.

If you have last minute changes to your abstract, please get them done no later than May 22nd so that I can work on getting the program book together.

Thanks to Pete Quesada for working through the OpenConf system to find out how to make updates!

Cheers,

Tim N