Using the Call For Papers Submissions Review System
for NBER Conference Organizers

Alex Aminoff, 2009-04-14
revised 2011-02-14
revised 2013-06-19

After prospective authors have submitted their responses to a Call for Papers for an upcoming conference through NBER's web forms, you, the conference organizers, can use the CFP Submissions Review system to accept submissions for presentation at the conference.

This system is similar to John Rust's Conference Maker. The primary reason NBER chose to develop our own system is to tightly integrate with the database used by the NBER Conference department as well as NBER's large database of economics researchers and students.

Accessing the system

You will receive a URL in an email from the Conference Staff that you can use to access the system for your conference.

Submissions and organizers' comments on submissions need to be confidential. Therefore, you can only access the system if you are logged in to the NBER web site. If you have trouble logging in, please contact NBER staff.

Corresponding authors and CVs

Each submission specifies a corresponding author. Their name is displayed in bold. If they provided a URL to a CV (Summer Institute only), the name will be a link to their CV.

Submissions to multiple workshops

The authors of a submission may submit it to more than one workshop or meeting, typically for NBER's Summer Institute. In this case, the other workshops to which it was submitted are shown below the listing of each submission. The color of the name of the other workshop indicates its status with the other woskshop; this can also be seen by mousing over. Note that if the authors changed the title or authors at all when submitting to different workshops the system has no way of knowing that it is the same submission and it will not appear.

Reading submissions

The web page displays a listing of submissions received, including the authors, title, and abstract (if any). If a document was uploaded along with the submission, or the authors specified a remote URL where you can read the submission, the title will be a link to the document.

You can also download all the submissions as a single zip file. Submissions where the author provided only a link to the document on their web site will be included only as a short text note with the URL.

Discussing the submissions: Comments

Below each submission is a box where conference organizers can enter their comments about the submission, e.g. "this is a good paper, we should approve it." To add a comment, type it in the box, then click the add this comment button. The comment, along with a time stamp and an attribution of which conference organizer wrote it, will appear. The comments of each conference organizer appear in a different color.

Making a decision

Once the organizers have agreed on how to dispose of a submission, click one of the buttons labelled "approve","reject", or "roll over".

In general, the effect of clicking on the button is to change the status of the submission, which removes it from the list of submissions Pending Action.

Rolling Over to the next conference

The roll over option works sligtly differently. It moves the submission to the next conference by season. So if the current conference is, for example, Labor Studies Fall 2013, rolling over a submission would submit it to the Labor Studies Spring 2014 meeting.

When a submission is rolled over to the next conference, all comments associated with the submission in the context of the current conference are removed, preserving confidentiality and impartiality for the next organizers.

Preliminary and Confirm

Clicking one of the buttons to dispose of a submission is not irrevocable - it merely moves the submission into the preliminary category. From there you can un-approve or un-reject it. To confirm your decisions, use the confirm buttons, which are available on a per-submission basis on the preliminary pages, or at the top of the screen to confirm the disposition of all the submissions in a category at once.

Once you have confirmed the disposition of a submission, the authors will be able to see that status on the front page of the NBER web site if they log in.

Notifying the Authors

The status-changing buttons in this interface do NOT automatically send a notification to the authors. (This is the most frequently asked question about this system). The system does not automatically notify authors that their submission has been accepted or rejected.

To notify all the authors of rejected or accepted submissions at once, use the "email options" link.

Alternatively, conference organizers or conference staff can notify the authors of one submission at a time using the link labelled "(email)" next to the authors.

---

If you experience any difficulty with the Conference Organizer CFP Submissions Review System, please contact: