3

I am looking at organizing a small conference next summer and I would like by all means to avoid concurrent dates with any major or highly-overlapping conference on the same or related topics. I thought that it would be really useful if there was an online directory where I can check a calendar of upcoming scientific conferences and workshops (maybe sorted by field) and plan mine on a week in which it does not coincide with an already planned event. That way I would not be "competing" for speakers and attendants against the organizer of a different event. I would prefer to avoid "manually" browsing the internet to find this information out, so a centralized online service would be perfect for my needs.

Does such an online resource exist? If the answer depends on the discipline, I am mostly interested in physics, chemistry and materials science conferences and workshops.

Miguel
  • 7,867
  • 3
  • 38
  • 66

2 Answers2

1

The first resource that springs to mind is the COMS directory, which lists conferences in the scientific disciplines (physics, chemistry, maths, life sciences etc). I don't know how comprehensive the listings are, but I think most major conferences should be listed there. You can filter the search by subject area (down to subfield level, such as astronomy or condensed matter) and country.

More specific resources exist which only list conferences in a certain country or subfield, for example the IOP (UK physics only), APS (mostly US physics only) or Inspire-HEP (international, but mostly high energy physics only).

Another resource used in my field (cosmology) is the UK Cosmo mailing list, maintained by the University of Sussex. Organisers can mail conference and summer/ winter school details to the list, and it's not limited to UK meetings either. A similar mailing list for your field may exist, although the benefit of such a list is its narrow scope-- after all, people don't want their inboxes spammed with emails about conferences in other fields, so I would use one with caution. Another drawback is that not everyone may be on such a list in the first place.

astronat supports the strike
  • 20,380
  • 6
  • 67
  • 91
  • This COMS directory looks quite interesting. They could improve the layout with a calendar view rather than the list they have, but it's a good place to start. The COMS software also looks interesting. – Miguel Jun 08 '17 at 12:00
0

PaperCrowd is a new research conference directory that may help. - Researchers can search for conferences based on research interests, topics, keywords location. They can follow events of interest.
- Organizers can add their events in a couple of minutes. - It's limited to academic research conferences to reduce clutter. - It's free.

Disclosure: PaperCrowd is Ex Ordo’s contribution to the research community. We’ve committed to keep it free. We’ll continue to develop and support the platform as a side project to offset the development costs. Making it light-touch to use and to support will minimise the on-going costs. We need the research community to embrace and populate PaperCrowd with conference data to make it a really useful resource. Please spread the word.

Read more about PaperCrowd here.

Dermot Lally
  • 41
  • 5