Conference Record

Your Own Copy

The conference website will go. The slides on the organiser's server go with it. The recording depends on an account somebody maintains. For teams comparing day-to-day work practices, read more provides further context.

Your own copy depends on you, which is the only dependency in this subject you control. An additional independent source is Directory of Open Access Books .

Reviewed August 9, 2026.

The five items

Per event, once, immediately afterwards.

The paper or abstract as submitted, in the format you wrote it and as a PDF.

The slides, as a PDF. Not only the source file — software changes and a PDF opens in fifteen years.

A screenshot of the programme page showing your talk, the date and the session. This becomes the irreplaceable item and it costs ten seconds.

The acceptance email, which contains the date, the review outcome and sometimes the reviewers' comments.

And the full citation, written out, in the form your field uses — event name, edition, dates, location, session, and any identifier assigned.

Why the citation matters most

Because it is the item you will need and cannot reconstruct.

Three years later, filling in a promotion form or a grant application, you need the exact event name, the edition number, the dates and the location. The website is gone, your memory has the year approximately right, and the reconstruction takes an hour of searching for something you had in front of you at the time.

Ninety seconds when the details are on screen replaces that hour, and it is the single highest-return action in this section.

Where to keep it

One folder, one naming convention. 2026-11-johannesburg-iatul-title.pdf sorts chronologically and is legible in ten years.

Somewhere backed up, which for most people means a synchronised drive plus one other copy.

And a plain-text index, one line per event, with the citation. A file you can search beats a folder you have to browse.

Not in a note-taking application you may stop using. The same reasoning as everything else here applied to your own tooling.

What to deposit as well

Because your own copy is durable and invisible.

An institutional repository, where you have one. It gives a permanent address, it is indexed, and most people never ask whether presentations are accepted — they usually are.

A subject repository, in fields that have one.

And your own professional page, which is not durable but is findable, and which is where somebody who heard the talk will look first.

The organiser's version of this

Brief, because it is the same list.

Programme and abstracts under the association's permanent domain. Slides collected as files rather than links. One deposit somewhere with a mandate.

Ten minutes of somebody's time, once per edition, against a four-day event that cost hundreds of people thousands of euros each to attend and currently leaves a page on a domain awaiting a renewal notice.

The short version