plenaria
Academic Conference Management · by C-MRiC

Most conference tools stopped evolving. This one didn't.

Plenaria is a full peer-review and conference-operations platform — built for the moment a "submit a paper, assign a reviewer" spreadsheet stops being enough. Every workflow below is shipped, working, and running in production today — not a roadmap slide.

7 paper types Auto-matched reviewers MFA everywhere, optional or required Full audit trail, GMT0 Zero vendor lock-in
7
Paper types, incl. Concept Note & Poster
4
Ways to view & manage assignments
4
Independent integrity checks per paper
1-click
Reviewer onboarding via shareable link
100%
Actions traced in the Events log
What's actually different

Every function you'd normally bolt on later, already built in

Legacy conference tools treat submissions, reviewer matching, integrity checks, and auditability as separate problems — often separate vendors. Plenaria treats them as one system.

Submissions

Formats that match how research actually happens

Long Paper, Short Paper, Extended Abstract, Journal Paper, Concept Note, Presentation Only, and Poster Submission — seven types most platforms don't offer, so early-stage work and poster-only participants aren't forced into a full-paper template that doesn't fit them.

Assignment

Reviewer matching that reads the paper

Automatic Assignment scores every reviewer's declared expertise against a paper's keywords, skips anyone with a detected conflict of interest, and spreads load across the committee — then shows you the full proposal to confirm before anything's created. Nothing is assigned blind.

Review Integrity

Blind by default, not by reminder

Double-blind review is the starting state for every new submission, not a checkbox a chair has to remember to tick. Conflicts of interest — shared affiliation, shared email domain — are flagged automatically before an assignment ever happens.

Originality

Four checks, one paper, zero extra tools

Publication cross-check against Crossref, Semantic Scholar, and OpenAlex; an internal similarity pass across every submission in the conference; optional Copyleaks plagiarism scanning; and AI-content detection heuristics — all from the submission itself, no separate subscription to wire up.

Onboarding

Links that do the paperwork for you

Every conference gets its own permanent author and reviewer registration links — post them on your CFP page and people land straight in your conference, no invitation required. Already-registered reviewers get added instantly on invite, no accept/decline round-trip.

Accountability

An audit log built for scrutiny, not an afterthought

Every submission, edit, assignment, and recorded review lands in a single searchable Events table — actor, email, country, IP address, all timestamped in GMT0. When someone asks "who did this and when," the answer is a filter, not a database query.

Side by side

What "full-featured" actually means here

Not every conference platform still on the market has kept pace with what a modern editorial workflow needs. Here's the gap.

CapabilityPlenaria by C-MRiCTypical legacy CMT-style tool
Paper types7, incl. Concept Note & Poster-onlyUsually 2–3, full-paper-centric
Reviewer assignmentManual + automatic keyword/expertise matching with a confirm stepManual only, or "bulk assign" with no matching logic
Conflict-of-interest detectionAutomatic, flagged before assignmentSelf-declared only, easy to miss
Blind reviewOn by default for every submissionManual per-paper toggle
Originality checksCross-check + internal similarity + optional plagiarism + AI detection, built inUsually none, or a separate paid add-on
Reviewer/author onboardingPer-conference self-service links + instant direct-add for existing usersChair invites one at a time
Audit trailFull Events log — actor, email, location, IP, timestamped GMT0Little to none beyond a status field
Two-factor authenticationRequired for admins, self-service optional for everyone elseRarely offered at all
Multi-role accountsAuthor, reviewer, and chair on one login, switch with one clickOften one role per account
OwnershipSelf-hosted, source you controlClosed SaaS, vendor-dependent
Security, taken seriously

Built to withstand a real pre-launch audit

Every permission boundary in Plenaria is scoped to the specific conference a request touches — not "logged in as chair of something." That closes the class of bug that lets a bad actor create a throwaway conference and quietly inherit access to every other one on the platform.

✓
Conference-scoped authorizationEvery chair/admin action checks membership in the specific conference it touches, everywhere.
✓
CSRF protection, platform-wideEvery form, every state-changing request, no exceptions.
✓
Rate limiting on auth & paid checksLogin, registration, and external API-backed checks are all throttled.
✓
CAPTCHA on every registration pathAuthor, reviewer, and invitation-completion — all covered.
✓
C-MRiC-restricted platform adminThe highest privilege level is structurally unreachable by outside accounts.
✓
Two-factor authenticationMandatory for admins; self-service and optional for every other account.
✓
Scrypt password hashingNo account enumeration on password reset, single-use tokens, 60-minute expiry.
✓
Full accountabilityEvery meaningful action is captured in the Events audit log — no silent admin actions.

Built for the conference you're actually running, not the one a generic tool assumes you are

Concept notes and posters alongside full papers. Reviewers matched by what they actually know. An audit trail that answers questions before they're asked. That's not a feature list — that's what running a conference on Plenaria looks like by default.

Open Plenaria See the full feature FAQ