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After its initial release, Proceedings Manager needed to evolve from a basic research management tool into a comprehensive platform for academic conferences. From 2021 to 2023, we transformed how societies and publishers handle conference proceedings, focusing on automated workflows, efficient peer review, and seamless collaboration between organizers, editors, and reviewers.
A platform that focuses on providing publishing tools for Scholarly Publishers and Societies, with submission management workflows and AI-powered research integrity solutions.
A lightweight web app that automatically extracts information from volumes of Research Papers, prepping the information for Conference Organizers (main users) to verify integrity issues and send volumes to Publishers, so that they can publish these with efficiency.
After its initial release, Proceedings Manager needed to evolve from a basic research paper management tool into a comprehensive platform that could handle the complex needs of conference organizers and publishers. As the product designer joining the team post-launch, my role was to help mature the product through new features and improvements that would make it more robust and user-friendly.
18 months (August 2021 - January 2023)
B2B team with 3 Backend Engineers, 3 Frontend Engineers, 1 QA Engineer, 1 Data Engineer, 1 Product Manager, 1 Engineering Manager and a User Researcher (with company wide obligations). I took on the role of Senior Product Designer and UX Researcher.
The world of scientific publishing has many moving parts, but conference proceedings hold a special place in the ecosystem. These collections of academic papers presented at conferences are often where groundbreaking research first sees the light of day. Think of proceedings as scientific time capsules - they capture emerging trends, document the evolution of ideas, and serve as the first public record of research that might later reshape our understanding of the world. Before research makes its way into prestigious journals, it often debuts at conferences where scientists share their early findings, gather feedback, and refine their work. Conference proceedings are more than just collections of papers; they're snapshots of science in motion, capturing research at its most dynamic stage.
The successful publication of conference proceedings relies on a carefully orchestrated collaboration between several key roles:
At the helm of proceedings management are the conference organizers. They oversee the entire process from start to finish, making high-level decisions about conference themes, submission criteria, and publication timelines. These individuals are responsible for ensuring the conference maintains its academic standards while meeting publication deadlines.
Editors, particularly the Editor-in-Chief, work closely with organizers to maintain the scientific integrity of the proceedings. They make final decisions on paper acceptance, oversee the peer review process, and ensure the overall quality of published content. In larger conferences, topic-specific editors (section editors) manage submissions within their areas of expertise.
The backbone of academic quality control, reviewers evaluate submitted papers for scientific merit, methodology, and relevance. They provide crucial feedback that helps maintain the conference's academic standards and contribute to the improvement of submitted work. Their domain expertise and objective assessment are essential for ensuring the quality of published proceedings.
These individuals act as the bridge between the conference and the publishing house. They ensure all submissions meet the publisher's technical requirements, handle copyright and legal documentation, and oversee the final production of the proceedings. Their role is crucial in maintaining publishing standards and ensuring smooth transition from accepted papers to published proceedings.
The primary contributors to proceedings, authors submit their research for consideration. They respond to reviewer feedback, make necessary revisions, and ensure their work meets the conference's submission requirements. Their role extends beyond initial submission to potentially multiple rounds of revision and final paper preparation.
Understanding these roles and their interactions was crucial for developing a platform that could support their various needs while maintaining efficient workflows. Each role requires specific tools and permissions, and their work needs to flow seamlessly together throughout the proceedings lifecycle.
In 2021, the proceedings management landscape revealed four critical challenges that affected different stakeholders in the academic publishing workflow:
Organizations often resorted to using expensive publishing platforms designed for journals, trying to force conference workflows into systems that weren't built for them. These platforms, while robust, were overly complex for conference needs and came with steep learning curves and even steeper price tags. Some larger conferences built custom systems, but these were costly to maintain and didn't scale well.
For those who couldn't afford expensive platforms, the tool landscape was a puzzle of disconnected pieces. Organizers typically used 3-4 different systems: one for collecting submissions, another for managing reviews, a third for author communications, and often a separate system for preparing final publications. This fragmentation created constant context-switching and increased the risk of errors.
Conference organizers were drowning in manual work. Papers arrived through email attachments, versions were tracked in sprawling spreadsheets, and review progress was managed through endless email chains. This manual approach wasn't just time-consuming - it was error-prone and increasingly unsustainable as conference submissions grew in volume.
While journal publications had established verification processes, conference proceedings often lacked rigorous quality checks. This created two problems: conferences couldn't easily validate submission quality, and publishers had limited visibility into the quality of proceedings they were agreeing to publish.
This fragmented landscape presented a clear opportunity. The market needed something between simple file management and complex publishing platforms - a tool specifically designed for the unique needs of conference proceedings. This was the gap Proceedings Manager was built to fill, and where I saw the opportunity to make a significant impact as the product evolved.
When I joined the team in 2021, Proceedings Manager had established its basic functionality but needed a clear path forward. Rather than rushing to add features, we needed to understand how different stakeholders interacted with conference proceedings and what would make their work easier.
We kicked off with a series of workshops involving our product, customer success, and sales teams. Using Miro boards, we mapped out the entire conference proceedings lifecycle - from paper submission to final publication. This exercise revealed interesting patterns: while each conference had unique elements, they shared common pain points around paper collection, review management, and publisher handoff.
Our customer success team brought valuable insights from daily user interactions. Sales provided perspective on what potential customers were asking for, and what was blocking deals. This holistic view helped us identify where we could make the biggest impact.
Through our research, we mapped out the critical paths that needed improvement:
Each of these workflows had specific pain points that needed addressing, but they also needed to work together seamlessly as part of a larger system.
Based on our research, we established three strategic priorities:
As we dug deeper into how different societies and publishers handled proceedings, we discovered that supplementary materials were far more complex than initially understood. While our platform already supported basic supplementary file uploads, the real-world needs were more nuanced and critical to the publication process.
In proceedings management, supplementary materials serve different purposes:
This diversity of needs led us to completely reimagine how supplementary materials should be handled in the platform.
We developed a two-tier approach to organizing supplementary materials:
This standalone section was dedicated specifically to peer review documentation, reflecting its unique importance in the proceedings validation process.
This section was further divided into two distinct groups to reflect their different purposes:
The foundation of reliable proceedings management lies in understanding and validating research content. Our first phase focused on building robust content validation capabilities, starting with the crucial groundwork of metadata extraction.
Before diving into content validation features, we recognized that our metadata extraction capabilities needed improvement. This wasn't just about making paper processing more efficient - it was about building a foundation that could support more sophisticated features down the line. By improving how we extracted and processed information from research papers, we could enable better content validation, enhance search capabilities, and provide more valuable insights to our users.
With improved metadata extraction in place, we could now focus on introducing meaningful content checks. Our approach began with a crucial insight: proceedings content needed to be verifiable, especially at the publisher handoff stage. We started lean, focusing on checks that could identify potential issues without overwhelming users. The first version of content checks was visible only to publishers and proceedings organizers/admins, and focused on three key areas:
We flagged papers that were manually uploaded by proceedings editors or managers. This wasn't necessarily problematic, but it helped identify submissions that bypassed the standard submission process and might need additional scrutiny.
We developed checks to identify authors with multiple papers in the same proceedings volume. While having multiple papers isn't automatically an issue, it could indicate preferential treatment in the selection process, especially in competitive conferences with limited slots.
Our system began analyzing citation patterns, looking for potential conflicts of interest. This included:
These scenarios were unusual citation patterns that might suggest bias or preferential treatment.
Peer review is the cornerstone of research validation, but our initial implementation only served a narrow range of use cases. Through user feedback and market analysis, we discovered that proceedings organizers needed more flexibility and automation in their review workflows.
Managing peer reviews for proceedings is a complex task that grows exponentially with volume. Conference organizers face multiple challenges:
For societies publishing multiple conferences yearly, this could mean managing reviews for hundreds of thousands of papers - an overwhelming task without the right tools.
Our first major improvement was automating the reviewer assignment process. We developed a system that intelligently matched reviewers to papers based on their expertise while ensuring no reviewer was overwhelmed with assignments. The system considered each reviewer's domain knowledge, current workload, and potential conflicts of interest when making assignments. While the system made intelligent suggestions, we maintained flexibility by allowing organizers to adjust these automated assignments when needed, striking a balance between efficiency and human oversight.
Through our research, we discovered that validation often isn't a one-time process. A paper might need several rounds of review as authors address feedback and make revisions. We built a system that could handle multiple review rounds seamlessly. When a paper needed another review, organizers could initiate a new round and selectively include reviewers based on their previous feedback. For example, if a paper had three initial reviewers and two requested changes, organizers could include just those two in the follow-up review of the revised version.
To support this iterative review process, we implemented comprehensive version control. Each time an author submitted a revised paper and a new review round began, the system preserved the entire history of previous reviews, feedback, and decisions. This created a clear audit trail showing how papers evolved through the review process. Organizers could track which reviewers participated in each round, what feedback they provided, and how authors responded to that feedback. This historical record proved invaluable for making final acceptance decisions and maintaining the integrity of the review process.
Our journey with Proceedings Manager demonstrates how understanding user needs can transform a basic tool into something truly impactful. From improving metadata extraction to introducing sophisticated review management and section editor capabilities, each enhancement was guided by real user challenges. The platform has evolved beyond simple file management to become a comprehensive system that respects the complex hierarchy of academic publishing while making proceedings management more efficient and reliable.
The evolution of Proceedings Manager from a basic tool to a comprehensive platform yielded significant improvements in how conference proceedings are managed and published.
8 closed deals with medium and large publishers due to the expansion of platform capabilities
Review assignment time cut by 75% with automated reviewer matching
Paper extraction and metadata processing time reduced from hours to minutes, enabling conferences to handle larger volumes of submissions efficiently.
Metadata extraction time reduced from 24+ hours to 50 minutes for batches of up to 150 papers
The evolution of Proceedings Manager revealed key insights about building tools for academic publishing. We discovered that flexibility was crucial - while conferences share common elements, each has unique workflows that required configurable rather than rigid solutions.
Our journey highlighted the importance of deep domain knowledge. Features like section editors and multi-round reviews weren't just add-ons, but reflected fundamental aspects of how the scientific community operates. Meanwhile, finding the right balance between automation and human oversight proved critical. While we automated routine tasks, we preserved expert judgment for crucial decisions.
Most importantly, we learned that strong foundations enable innovation. Our early focus on metadata extraction and organizational hierarchies, though basic, made it easier to build more sophisticated features later.
Building on our success with user management and workflow improvements, we're now focusing on creating deeper insights and connections within the platform. We're developing comprehensive analytics capabilities to help conferences track submission trends, reviewer performance, and publication outcomes. This will give organizers deeper insights into their proceedings' impact and help identify areas for improvement.
The roadmap also includes expanding author-facing features and creating tighter integrations with publisher systems. We envision a future where the platform can facilitate better collaboration between related conferences, allowing them to share reviewer pools and track research progression across events while maintaining consistent quality standards. These developments aim to further streamline the proceedings management process while maintaining the high standards of academic publishing.
©Lanre Fadire 2023
