ConfIDent:About

From ConfIDent

Contact

Please contact us via mail (confident[@]tib.eu) if you would like to learn more about our service or register your conferences with ConfIDent.

Objectives

ConfIDent provides researchers with a quick and straightforward way to explore scientific events relevant to their fields of study and interests. For conference organizers, the platform enhances event visibility and ensures long-term discoverability. By assigning Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), ConfIDent enables more effective metadata harvesting and sustainable archiving, even if the conference website becomes inaccessible. For scientific institutions, the service offers a comprehensive overview of their hosted events, promoting greater transparency in research-related activities.

The Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB) – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology and the Information Systems and Databases Group at RWTH Aachen (Informatik 5) jointly developed ConfIDent as a service platform between 2019 and 2023. Pilot communities for the project included Computer Science and Transportation and Mobility Research. The project was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).

ConfIDent’s mission is to ensure the permanent accessibility of high-quality metadata for conferences and other scientific events. The platform allows representatives from various disciplines to directly contribute event data, while TIB oversees a curation process to maintain metadata quality.

ConfIDent’s metadata quality workflow

ConfIDent aims to build a registry of legitimate academic events by employing a multi-step workflow to exclude predatory conferences, which exploit researchers by prioritizing profit over quality and transparency. The process starts with gathering reliable event information from trusted institutions such as universities, learned societies or other credible sources like long-established conference series, community calendars or community-accepted conference evaluation standards. Fee-free events are automatically included, while fee-based events are subject to a review process that begins with identifying the responsible organizer and assessing the transparency of financial and operational practices. False information on peer review process, affiliation, non-profit status or event format will result in exclusion. Additional indicators of predatory behavior, such as overlapping or fake events, are also assessed. In unclear cases, subject librarians with academic expertise assess academic quality and affiliation. Despite its thoroughness, the workflow cannot guarantee complete exclusion of predatory events due to the opaque nature of some practices, so the ultimate responsibility lies with the researchers. Future plans include integrating user feedback, automating metadata, and promoting greater transparency in the organization of academic events to make it more difficult for predatory conferences to deceive researchers. By ensuring that only credible events are indexed, ConfIDent aims to support researchers' decision-making and promote accountability in academic publishing. You can find out more details about this on TIB Blog about ConfIDent’s predatory conference identification workflow.

Resources and Output

Publications

  • Auhunas, S., Hagemann-Wilholt, S., Hauschke, C., Kampe, B., Rudakova, T., Shapovalov, V., & Shapovalov, Y. (2024). Persistent conference identifiers in CRIS – first implementations with VIVO and URIS. In Procedia Computer Science (Vol. 249, pp. 254–263). Elsevier BV. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2024.11.071
  • Franken, J.; Birukou, A.; Eckert, K.; Fahl, W.; Hauschke, C.; Lange, C. (2022): Persistent Identification for Conferences. In: Data Science Journal, 21(11), pp.1-18. http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2022-011.
  • Fahl, W.; Holzheim, T.; Lange, C.; Decker, S. (2022): Semantification of CEUR-WS with Wikidata as a target Knowledge Graph. In: Text2KG@ESWC 2023. URL: https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3447/Text2KG_Paper_13.pdf.
  • Lange, C.; Decker, S.; Fahl; W.; Holzheim, T.; Westerinen, A. (2022): Getting and hosting your own copy of Wikidata. In: Proceedings of the 3rd Wikidata Workshop 2022, Co-located with the 21st International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), October 2022, online. URL: https://scholia.toolforge.org/work/Q115055567.
  • Lange, C.; Decker, S.; Fahl; W.; Holzheim, T.; Westerinen, A. (2022): Property cardinality analysis to extract truly tabular query results from Wikidata. In: Proceedings of the 3rd Wikidata Workshop 2022, Co-located with the 21st International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), October 2022, online. URL: https://scholia.toolforge.org/work/Q115053494.
  • Vahdati, S.; Fathalla, S.; Lange, C.; Behrend, A.; Say, A.; Say, Z.; Auer, S. (2020): A comprehensive quality assessment framework for scientific events. In: Scientometrics 126 (1), S. 641–682. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03758-1 .
  • Hagemann-Wilholt, S.; Plank, M.; Hauschke, C. (2020): ConfIDent – An Open Platform for FAIR Conference Metadata. In: Open Science Encompasses New Forms of Grey Literature. GL21 Conference Proceedings. Twenty-First International Conference on Grey Literature. Hannover, Germany, October 22-23, 2019. German National Library of Science and Technology. Amsterdam: TextRelease, S. 47–51; https://doi.org/10.15488/9424 .
  • Fathalla, S.; Vahdati, S.; Lange, C.; Auer, S. (2020): Scholarly event characteristics in four fields of science: a metrics-based analysis. In: Scientometrics 6 (3), S. 1. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03391-y .

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