ConfIDent: FIND, BROWSE and ANNOUNCE

Veröffentlicht am 23. Februar 20235. Februar 2024 von Stephanie Hagemann-Wilholt und Tim Janowsky

The TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology is developing ConfIDent, a platform to provide sustainable information on scientific events as part of a DFG funded project. ConfIDent is a service for researchers, universities, infrastructure institutions, and professional societies based on the FAIR principles. We launched ConfIDent last year, but since then the system has grown again and there is more to discover:

What does ConfIDent offer for researchers?

You can FIND upcoming academic events in your research community and you can filter by Academic Field, Country, keywords or all of them.
You can BROWSE to see all upcoming and historical events and event series with more filter options. We have currently indexed over 1,500 academic event series and over 15,000 academic events.
All new events have to pass our Predatory Identification Workflow before they are indexed in order to keep the platform as free of predatory conferences as possible. This should help researchers avoid falling into the trap of predatory conference providers.
We offer detailed descriptions of academic events:
- Name of event: acronym, title, ordinal;
- Event period: start and end date;
- Mode: in-person, hybrid, or online;
- Location: city, region, and country;
- Context information: linked event series, official website, academic field;
- Service information: link to official submission page, calendar function with deadlines;
- Unique and persistent identification: Digital Object Identifier (DOI) of event;
- In the pipeline: links to related publications such as proceedings.
  Screenshot of event entry with metadata, calendar function and map in ConfIDent.

What does ConfIDent offer to organizers?

You can ANNOUNCE your event: We are currently working to automate registration processes. Until the end of the first quarter 2023, the technical requirements will be in place so that users will be able to create entries themselves. A moderation step will be implemented to check new entries based on the Predatory Identification Workflow. From then on, you can create and publish entries in ConfIDent yourself using the ANNOUNCE field.
We archive your event data and provide them with a persistent identifier, so that your event is still findable and referable even if the event homepage is no longer. We are minting DOIs for events and event series and with your help have provided user guidelines for using DataCite’s metadata schema for this purpose.

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.

What does ConfIDent offer to data reusers?

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.
Unique identification PIDs (DOIs) for conferences;
A well-structured, sophisticated metadata schema that in turn has its foundation in the Academic Event Ontology (AEON).

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.