Setting up final submissions

When all submissions have been accepted, it's time to plan for accepting your final drafts or camera ready versions of papers/abstracts. The final submissions feature in Ex Ordo allows you to do 6 things:

Accept final drafts
Transfer copyright
Ask authors to comment on reviewer feedback
Ask authors for extra information
Ask for extra information about the submission
Upload papers

To reach this configuration select Final Submissions from your Submissions hub

Step 1) Accept Final Submissions

After authors have been notified of their acceptance, you can open the system up again to allow authors to make changes. These will generally be small spelling or grammar errors - getting this corrected at this stage prevents problems when you are producing a book or online programme.

The first thing you must do is to set the dates from which accepted authors will be able to upload their final material or make changes to their submissions, and the deadline by which this must be done. The system will be open for Final submissions between those dates.

Step 2) Questions Tab

a) Ask Authors for Source files

You can also require them to upload their source files, which can be any format.

b) Comment on Reviewer Feedback

With this option, when the author logs in to view reviewer comments, they will be given a text box where they can reply to the reviewer feedback. This is particularly useful where their acceptance was conditional upon them acting on reviewer feedback.

Step 3) Copyright disclaimer

You may also want to ask the author to transfer the copyright over to you so that you can publish their work in conference materials. You can choose to ask them to do this in two ways:

Download a document, sign it, scan it and upload it
Tick a check box accepting terms and conditions.

Step 4) Author Question

In the Author Question panel, you have the option to add additional questions you need your authors to answer about themselves e.g their telephone number or credentials. These questions will be asked of every author on every submission. You can make each question optional or mandatory, depending on your requirements. All questions added in the submission workflow will be visible in this panel as well so you can decide to disable them if they are not needed in this stage.

You can choose what type of questions to ask your authors, listed below:

Answer: A short answer
Explain: A paragraph answer
Choose: A dropdown of options
Agree: A checkbox to agree with a statement
File Upload: An upload of a file

More information about adding these fields can be found here.

Step 5) Additional Information

As in the previous step this is an optional configuration where you can request extra information about the submission e.g. ethics questions or references.

You can choose what type of questions to add, listed below:

Answer: A short answer
Explain: A paragraph answer
Choose: A dropdown of options
Agree: A checkbox to agree with a statement
File Upload: An upload of a file

The options available here are the same as in the Author Question step. As mentioned before, all questions that were added in the submission stage will be visible also here in the Final Submission workflow.

Step 6) File Formats - Upload Papers

Some conferences may accept the abstracts to review in the first instance and when they are accepted, ask for the papers. You can require accepted authors to upload PDF or Word Doc format documents, either of these (by selecting Any), or None to not require any file upload. If you are requiring them to upload files you should include some guidelines in the field displayed to indicate to the authors what file format their final draft must be in and any other formatting guidelines (e.g. single/double spaced, A4/US letter). To make your guide look a bit nicer you can use Ex Ordo text editor. More about this you can find on the link here.

Step 7) Guide for Authors

Finally, as with the initial submission process, guidance text will be displayed to the accepted authors when they begin the process of uploading their final drafts. You should include any relevant information, especially deadlines and any file formatting instructions. You can also use the the formatting options in the Ex Ordo text editor.

Other Uses For Final Submissions:

Some conferences have unique features such as issuing CPD credits to an author who has been accepted. In this case, we would upload the CPD form where the copyright document would have been uploaded. The authors can then download this form, scan it and upload it back in.

Another example is where a conference does not need copyright transferred but needs to know if they cannot publish their work in a journal. This can be done using the check box option for copyright and changing the text.

Edits:

If you would like to make some edits in this workflow select Final Submissions hub from your dashboard and then Configure Final Submissions tab as shown below: