About This Site

This site is about evaluating conferences: whether an event is what it claims to be, what attending actually costs, and what survives it. For a separate operational reference outside conference evaluation, see this resource .

Who it is for

Somebody who received an invitation and does not know whether it is real. Somebody deciding whether a legitimate conference is worth its total cost. And somebody who presented three years ago and cannot find the evidence. For wider background, see ORCID .

It covers academic and industry events, because the problem crossed that boundary and the checks differ.

Editorial scope

The site evaluates conference claims through verifiable records, costs and preserved evidence rather than unpublished credentials or personal authority.

What this site refuses to do

Name any conference as predatory. The signals are described and you apply them. The exception is public regulatory action, where the finding is a matter of record.

Maintain a list of good conferences. It would age badly and would implicitly endorse events it cannot evaluate for a reader it does not know.

Present appearance as evidence. Every check here points at something outside the organiser's control, because that is the only kind that still works.

Or pretend the checks work equally for everybody. They assume a network, an institution or a subscription, and the people they fail are the people most targeted.

About this domain

This domain hosted the 36th IATUL conference — the International Association of University Libraries — in Hannover, 5–9 July 2015, hosted by TIB, the German National Library of Science and Technology.

The archive is preserved in full at /2015/: the programme, the abstracts and presenters page running to 16,122 words, the general information and the registration pages.

It is kept because the names and abstracts in it belong to the presenters, who cite these addresses in their own professional records and who had no say in this domain changing subject.

The association’s own site is separate from this archive.

And the archive is the case study for the record section — a conference site surviving by accident is the clearest available demonstration of what this part of the site argues.

Corrections

Errors are logged, with the date and what changed. The standards are on the method page.