EasyChair

EasyChair
Name	EasyChair
Developer	EasyChair Ltd.
Released	2002
Operating system	Cross-platform
Genre	Conference management system
License	Proprietary

EasyChair EasyChair is a web-based conference management system used by academic conferences, workshops, and symposia. It provides tools for paper submission, peer review, program committee coordination, and proceedings preparation, and integrates with scholarly events across computer science, engineering, and other fields. Widely adopted by organizers associated with professional societies, universities, and research institutes, the platform supports event administration at scale.

Overview

EasyChair serves conference organizers, program committee members, authors, and reviewers from institutions such as Association for Computing Machinery, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, European Research Council, National Institutes of Health, and Max Planck Society. It facilitates workflows common to events like NeurIPS, International Conference on Machine Learning, ACM SIGCOMM, IEEE CVPR, and IJCAI while interoperating with indexing services and digital libraries such as arXiv, DBLP, ACL Anthology, IEEE Xplore, and ACM Digital Library. Organizers from universities like Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, and University of Tokyo use the platform alongside societies including British Computer Society, European Association for Theoretical Computer Science, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, American Mathematical Society, and American Physical Society.

History and Development

Development began in the early 2000s to address needs encountered at events organized by research groups at institutions such as Royal Holloway, University of London, University College London, University of Edinburgh, University of Manchester, and Imperial College London. Early adopters included conferences like ICML and workshops affiliated with European Conference on Machine Learning, ACM SIGPLAN, SIGGRAPH, CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, and USENIX. Over time, EasyChair added features inspired by practices at Stanford AI Lab, Carnegie Mellon University, Bell Labs, IBM Research, and Microsoft Research, and responded to governance and policy debates involving European Commission, Council of Europe, Data Protection Authority (France), and UK Information Commissioner's Office.

Features and Functionality

Core features include submission handling, reviewer assignment, conflict-of-interest management, and proceedings export used by events like SOSP, OSDI, SIGCOMM, INFOCOM, and IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. The system supports workflows used by program committees from organizations such as ACM SIGMOD, ACM SIGARCH, ACM SIGKDD, IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, and IFIP. Review management capabilities parallel practices at NeurIPS, AAAI, IJCAI, CVPR, and ECCV, with anonymization options similar to policies at Journal of Machine Learning Research and Nature Communications. Integration points and metadata formats mirror those used by CrossRef, ORCID, Scopus, Web of Science, and PubMed Central.

Administrative features include role management for chairs and co-chairs practiced at ICLR, EMNLP, ACL, NAACL, and SIGIR, and automated notifications comparable to services offered by EasyChair Ltd. competitors like ConfTool, HotCRP, OpenConf, Microsoft CMT, and Ex Ordo. Usability considerations reflect recommendations from user experience teams at Google, Apple Inc., Mozilla Foundation, NIST, and Human-Computer Interaction community conferences such as CHI and UIST.

Usage in Academic Conferences

Academic events across disciplines—computer science, electrical engineering, mathematics, and cognitive science—use the platform for submission and review. Conferences and workshops hosted by ACM, IEEE, SIAM, CERN, Max Planck Institute for Informatics, ETH Zurich, Tsinghua University, Peking University, National University of Singapore, Australian National University, and University of Toronto commonly rely on these services. Organizers coordinate with program committees featuring researchers from Google Research, Facebook AI Research, DeepMind, OpenAI, Bell Labs, and IBM Watson Research Center and follow practices established at events like SIGGRAPH, NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR, and EMNLP.

Privacy, Security, and Data Policies

Privacy and security practices have been discussed in forums involving European Data Protection Supervisor, Information Commissioner's Office, US Department of Commerce, National Institute of Standards and Technology, ENISA, and institutional review boards at universities such as Harvard University, Yale University, Princeton University, and Columbia University. Data retention, access controls, and export procedures intersect with standards from ISO/IEC 27001, GDPR, HIPAA (where applicable), and bibliographic indexing rules used by CrossRef and ORCID. Audits and incident responses reference best practices from SANS Institute, CERT Coordination Center, OWASP, and CIS benchmarks.

Reception and Criticism

Reception among organizers and researchers has ranged from praise in community mailing lists tied to SIGMOD, SIGPLAN, SIGIR, and SIGCOMM to criticism in blogs and open letters from academics at MIT, Princeton University, University of California, Berkeley, ETH Zurich, and University of Oxford regarding usability, pricing, and data portability. Competitors and comparisons in reviews include HotCRP, OpenReview, ConfTool, EasyChair Ltd. alternatives discussed at panels in NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, and ECAI. Debates over anonymization policies, reviewer anonymity, and reproducibility echo concerns raised in publications by Nature, Science, Communications of the ACM, IEEE Spectrum, and by committees of AAAI and ACM.

Category:Academic conference management systems