How to run a conference on iConf Studio.

Your account and your organisation

Signing up creates two things: you, and the organisation you are signing up on behalf of — a faculty, a society, a research centre. Conferences belong to the organisation rather than to you personally, which is what lets a colleague take one over when you move on.

Your plan sits on the organisation too, so every conference it runs draws on the same subscription and the same seat count.

Creating a conference

A conference needs a name, its dates, a timezone and a currency. The timezone is the one the programme is printed in, and the currency is the one delegates are charged in — that one is fixed once money has moved, so it is worth a moment.

You also choose what the website starts as. A blank outline gives you fourteen pages with the right structure and prompts to fill in; the complete example gives you the same fourteen filled in end to end, which you replace. The example is faster to judge and slower to finish, because everything in it has to be rewritten before you can publish.

Your address

Every conference gets its own subdomain — yourconference.iconf.me — and that is where the whole public site lives: pages, programme, submission portal, registration.

It can be changed freely before you publish and not afterwards. By then it is printed on a call for papers and pasted into other people’s emails, and a changed address turns all of that into a dead link.

Nothing is public until you say so

A conference is created as a draft. Visitors to the address see a holding page, your team sees everything, and nothing is indexed. Publishing is one deliberate action, and it can be undone.

Pages and blocks

A page is a stack of blocks — text, images, a call to action, a countdown, a list of speakers, a table of fees. You add, reorder and hide blocks; the theme decides how each one looks, so a page cannot end up looking like it came from a different website.

Pages are drafts until published, and a page published with a future date is scheduled rather than live. Every save keeps a revision you can go back to.

An image without a description for screen readers stops a page from being published. That is deliberate: it is a thirty-second job at the time and an expensive retrofit across a finished site.

The menu

Any page can be in the menu or out of it, under its own name or a shorter label. Entries can be reordered, and one of them can point somewhere else entirely — the university’s accommodation booking, a form, last year’s proceedings. A link like that can open in a new tab or in the same one, and both are editable afterwards.

A few addresses belong to the software rather than to you: /submissions is the author portal, and there are one or two others. If you try to give a page one of those, it says so rather than quietly becoming unreachable.

The footer

The footer is up to four columns, each holding any blocks you like, each with an optional heading, and each able to be hidden without being dismantled. Underneath sits a closing line — usually an address — and, if you want them, the contact address and a row of social links.

Design

Pick a theme, then adjust the colours, the corner radius and the content width. Upload a logo and choose whether the header shows the logo, the conference name, or both — and how tall the logo stands, and how much space sits around it.

Colours you set are checked for contrast where text sits on them, because a brand colour that makes your own text unreadable is a decision nobody makes on purpose.

Four switches

Paper submission and peer review, programme scheduling, abstracts and proceedings, and delegate registration can each be switched off for a conference that does not use them. Off means gone: no menu entry for your committee, and nothing for a delegate to find on the website.

Plenty of conferences take no papers, or charge nothing, or publish nothing. Switching those off is not hiding a feature — it is the difference between a product that fits your event and one that keeps asking about things you are not doing.

What your plan includes

A switch cannot turn on something your plan does not include, and your plan cannot force on something you have switched off. Items your plan does not reach still appear in the menu, marked, so you can see what the product does — opening one explains what it is and what it costs rather than pretending it does not exist.

Setting up the call

You define the submission types (full paper, abstract, poster), the topics authors choose from, the word limits, and the dates the portal opens and closes. Authors create their own account on your website — not on ours — and their account belongs to your conference alone.

What authors do

An author writes a title, an abstract, keywords and a list of co-authors, picks topics, uploads a manuscript, and submits. Until they press submit it is a draft they can keep editing; afterwards they can withdraw but not quietly rewrite.

Reviewers

You invite reviewers by email and record what each of them knows about. They accept or decline from the invitation, and can declare a conflict of interest on any paper.

You build the review form yourself: the criteria, the scale each is scored on, and which comments are for the author and which are for the committee only.

Everything about reviewers lives on one screen — the committee, the form, the letters they are sent, and the signature that goes on their certificate.

Authors who also review

After somebody submits a paper, they are asked whether they would review two or three themselves. It is the best moment to ask — they have just asked your committee to read their work — and most committees are built from exactly these people.

Nobody joins by ticking a box. Everyone who offers appears on your Reviewers screen with their affiliation and subjects, and you add them or you do not. Nobody is ever sent a paper they wrote, or one written by a colleague at the same institution.

If you run a closed committee, turn the question off under the call for papers settings.

Chasing, without doing it yourself

Reviewing fails quietly. Papers go out, nothing comes back, and you discover three weeks before the programme is due that several reviewers never opened the message — by which time every option is a bad one.

So a reviewer is written to when a paper is assigned, asked again after a few days of silence, reminded before the deadline, and thanked when the review arrives. If they never answer at all, the paper is taken back so you can give it to somebody else while there is still time. You choose every one of those intervals, and leaving a box empty switches that letter off — some committees prefer to chase by hand, and that works too.

You can also write to one reviewer at any moment, whatever the clock says.

Certificates for reviewers

Peer review is unpaid and largely invisible, and the people doing it are assessed every year on evidence of exactly this kind of service. A thank-you email is gone the moment it is filed; a dated certificate on your letterhead goes into a promotion file.

One click per reviewer, on your conference’s letterhead, with your logo and a signature you upload. The wording is yours. It is offered only for reviews that were actually completed.

Everything your conference says, on one screen

Every message the conference sends — the receipt an author gets, the notice to co-authors, the five letters a reviewer receives, the decisions, the digest your committee reads — is on the Letters screen, grouped by who receives it. The defaults are usable as they are; edit them so they sound like you.

Each row says when that letter goes out. Editing one opens a small window with the wording, a list of placeholders you click to insert — {{author}}, {{reference}}, {{title}} — and a preview that fills them in with sample values so you can read it as the person receiving it will.

When each letter goes is still set beside the work it belongs to, because timing is part of running the process. What it says is here.

Designing the letter and the certificate

Two of those are printed rather than sent: the letter of acceptance an author hands to a visa office, and the certificate a reviewer files with a promotion case. Both have a Design button beside them.

Choose a layout, a typeface for the body and one for the headings, a size, your colour, the paper size and margins, whether there is a border, and whether the logo, the signature, the reference number and the footer are shown. A sheet of paper sits beside the controls showing the real document — the same file that gets sent, in the same fonts — and it redraws as you change things. There is a Download PDF button when you want to hold one.

If your society already has a letterhead its committee approved, upload it and the document is printed onto that instead.

Assigning the work

Papers can be assigned by hand, or matched automatically by topic against what reviewers said they know — which gets it roughly right and leaves you to fix the rest. Reviewers see only what they are assigned, minus anything they have a conflict on.

Decisions

Scores and comments come back into one screen per paper. You decide accept, minor revision, major revision or reject, write a note, and send. The author is emailed and can download a letter of acceptance whenever they need one afterwards — a visa office often asks months later.

Accepted authors are then asked for the camera-ready version.

Asking permission

Before anything is published you set out the licence — the real terms, which you can edit until somebody has signed it — and every author answers for their own paper. Agreements and refusals are both recorded, with the name, the time and the version of the licence they saw.

Silence is never treated as consent. A paper nobody has answered for stays out of the volume.

Building a volume

A publication set is a book of abstracts or a proceedings volume: you choose which accepted papers are in it and in what order. It comes out as a PDF with a title page, a contents list with real page numbers, running heads and page numbers throughout.

Where authors have supplied camera-ready PDFs, those pages can be bound into the volume itself rather than left as separate files.

A manifest comes with it — every paper, its authors, their affiliations and ORCIDs, the pages it occupies — which is what a publisher or a DOI registrar asks for.

Building the schedule

Add your rooms, then your sessions: a day, a start and end time, a room, a chair. Accepted papers are dragged into sessions from a list of everything not yet scheduled, so nothing gets forgotten and nothing gets scheduled twice.

Two sessions wanting the same room at the same time are refused, with the clash named.

Publishing it

The programme is published separately from the website, because it is wrong for most of the weeks it takes to build and a half-finished running order is something people plan travel around.

Once published it appears in your menu and in your sitemap. You can also let delegates open each paper to read its abstract and keywords, which is what somebody choosing between two parallel sessions actually needs. An author who refused permission to publish their abstract is left out of that whatever you choose.

Rates and what they include

You set the registration types — early bird, student, member, one-day — each with its price, its dates and, if you want, a cap on places. A type that has sold out closes itself.

The price a delegate sees is frozen onto their registration when they register, so a rate change afterwards never rewrites what somebody already owes.

Being paid

Payment is between the delegate and you. Publish your bank details for a transfer, a QR code, or a payment link you already have — the money goes straight to your account, we never touch it, and we take nothing from it.

Delegates upload proof of payment; you mark a registration paid when it lands. They are emailed a confirmation when they register and a receipt when you mark it paid, and can download either afterwards.

Whose plan applies

The conference’s, not the person’s. Somebody you invite may already have their own free account and their own small conference on it; inside yours they get everything your plan includes, because you bought it to run your event and it is your event they are working on.

It works only in that direction. The invitation gives them nothing on their own conference, and nothing on your other ones.

What it costs is a seat. Everybody with access to any of your conferences counts against your plan’s people limit, pending invitations included, so the price of a bigger committee is the tier — not a charge per colleague.

Roles

People are invited to one conference at a time, with a role: an editor who writes the website, a chair who runs the review, and so on. Membership of one conference is never a way into another, which matters when one organisation runs several.

Invitations are emailed and expire. Removing somebody removes their access and leaves their work alone.

Starting the next edition

A conference is a series of one from the day it is created. When you start the next edition it takes over the address, and the previous year moves to a dated one — /2026 — where it stays online, complete, with its own menu, its own programme and its own theme.

That is the point: the call for papers you circulated last year still leads somewhere, and the programme somebody cited still exists.

Yours and theirs

You can export everything held about you, and ask for your account to be erased. Authors, reviewers and delegates can do the same on the conference’s own website, without going through you.

Data belonging to one conference is not visible to another, and platform staff acting on an account leave an audit trail that says so.