Plenaria is a conference management platform: authors submit papers, reviewers evaluate them, and chairs/organisers run the review process and publish decisions — all for one or more conferences on the same platform.

From the sign-in page, choose Register as Author if you plan to submit a paper, or Register as Reviewer if you've been asked to review. If a chair or admin invited you by email, use the Accept link in that email instead — it takes you straight to a short registration form pre-filled with your invited role. If you followed a link from a conference's own website or CFP announcement, you're already covered too — every conference has its own unique registration link, so that page registers you and adds you to that conference in one step, with no separate invitation needed. If you already have a Plenaria account and click an invitation or registration link for an email that's already registered, you won't end up with a duplicate account — you'll just be asked to sign in, and the conference is added to your existing account automatically.

• Author — submits papers and tracks their own submissions only.
• Reviewer — evaluates papers assigned to them and can contact the author of an assigned paper.
• Chair — runs a conference: assigns reviewers, makes decisions, manages users, invites people, and views analytics/reports for conferences they chair.
• Admin — platform-level oversight across every conference. Reserved for C-MRiC staff accounts (an @c-mric.org/@c-mric.com address) and requires two-factor authentication — see Account & Security below.

Yes — a chair can also be an author, a reviewer can also chair a different conference, and so on. A chair/admin grants extra roles from Administration → User Management. If your account holds more than one role, an "Acting as: <role>" switcher appears in the top bar — pick the role you want active. Permissions are always based on whichever role is currently active, so switching to Author hides chair/reviewer features until you switch back.

Any logged-in user can create a conference — go to Conferences → Create Conference in the sidebar and fill in the details (name, dates, venue, accepted formats). You automatically become that conference's chair.

Use the conference dropdown at the top of the sidebar, or go to Conferences → My Conferences and click Switch To on the one you want. Only conferences you belong to appear here — as its chair, as an author who has submitted to it, or as a reviewer assigned to something in it.

The list only shows conferences you're a member of. You become a member automatically by creating a conference, submitting a paper to it, being assigned to review for it, or accepting an invitation tied to it. Ask the conference's chair to invite you if none of those apply yet.

Go to Submissions → New Submission. Fill in the title, abstract, paper type, and attach your file (PDF/DOCX/etc., depending on what the conference accepts). Submissions are only allowed while the conference's submission window is open. If you have several conferences active or want to submit somewhere you haven't joined yet, see Submissions below for how to pick the right one.

Yes, while it's in Submitted or Revision Required status — open it under My Submissions and click Edit. Once a decision has been made, editing is closed.

No. As an author, My Submissions only ever shows your own papers. Conference-wide views (All Submissions, Analytics, Conference Data) are limited to reviewers, chairs, and admins.

Submissions → New Submission uses whichever conference is currently active in the top bar. If none is active, or you'd rather submit somewhere else, you'll see a picker listing every conference on the platform that's currently open for submissions — including ones you haven't joined yet. You don't need to be a member first; picking one and submitting adds you as an author automatically. From the submission form itself, a "Not the right conference?" link always takes you back to that picker.

Plenaria supports seven paper types, chosen at submission time:

• Long Paper — a full, archival research paper.
• Short Paper — a shorter, focused contribution.
• Extended Abstract — a condensed summary of work in progress or early results.
• Journal Paper — for tracks tied to a journal issue rather than the general proceedings.
• Concept Note — an early-stage idea or proposal, submitted before full results exist.
• Presentation Only — a talk with no accompanying archival paper.
• Poster Submission — for poster-session-only participation.

The last three — Concept Note, Presentation Only, and Poster Submission — aren't offered by many other conference platforms. They exist so you can participate at an earlier stage, present without publishing, or submit a poster-only contribution, instead of being forced into a full-paper format that doesn't fit what you're actually submitting. All seven are available on every conference; what varies by conference is which file formats it accepts (see below), not which paper types.

PDF, DOC, DOCX, TEX, and ZIP, up to 50 MB — though an individual conference may accept only some of these; the New Submission page shows exactly which. The uploaded file's actual content is checked against its extension, so renaming a file to make it look like an accepted format won't work.

Yes — there's no limit on how many papers you submit, to the same conference or different ones. Each goes through New Submission separately and is tracked on its own in My Submissions.

Go to Reviews → My Reviews, or Status → Assigned to Me for a status overview across everything assigned to you.

Open the submission from My Reviews and fill in the scoring criteria, written comments, and recommendation. You can save a draft and come back before marking it complete.

Yes — open the submission and use the Contact Author card. This only works for papers assigned to you; you can't message the author of a submission you aren't reviewing. For anonymised submissions, the message still reaches the author without revealing their identity to you in the interface.

The system auto-detects likely conflicts (shared affiliation or email domain with the author). The chair can also manually flag a conflict under Programme Committee → Conflicts of Interest. Flagged reviewers won't be assigned to that paper.

Go to Programme Committee → Invite Reviewer, enter one email address per line, choose the role (Reviewer or Chair), and send. If an address doesn't already have a Plenaria account, that person gets an email with Accept and Decline buttons — if an address bounces, the raw invitation link is also shown on that page so you can share it manually. If an address already has an account on the platform, there's no invitation step at all: they're added to your conference immediately and simply get a heads-up email that they've been added — no accept/decline needed.

Every conference gets two unique, permanent links — one for authors, one for reviewers — shown on Administration → Conference Settings. Post the author link on your CFP page, in emails, or on social media; anyone who registers through it is added to your conference immediately, no invitation required. The links are stable for the life of the conference, so it's safe to publish them anywhere.

Administration → Invitations lists every invitation with its status, filterable by Accepted / Declined / No Response. You can resend any invitation that hasn't been accepted yet, which resets it back to "No Response".

Administration → Email Log — every invitation and every author/reviewer contact message, with sender, recipient, subject, related submission or conference, and whether delivery succeeded or failed.

Open the submission and click Assign Reviewers, or use Assignments → Overview to manage assignments across every submission at once. Reviewers with a detected conflict of interest are flagged in the list. Two other views under Assignments give you the same information grouped differently: By Reviewer shows each reviewer's full paper list, and By Paper shows each paper's assigned reviewers and their review status, with the least-covered papers surfaced first.

Yes — Assignments → Automatic Assignment matches each paper's keywords against reviewers' declared Domains of Expertise and proposes reviewers for any paper below your target reviewer count, skipping anyone with a detected conflict of interest and spreading matches across reviewers rather than piling them onto the same few people. Nothing is assigned automatically without your say-so: it shows you a proposal with a match score for each pairing, you can untick any you don't want, and assignments are only created once you confirm. Papers with no reviewer whose expertise matches closely enough simply won't get a proposal — assign those manually from Overview or By Paper instead.

Open the submission and use the Editorial Decision panel, or set it quickly from Status → All Submissions. Decisions and acceptance rates then feed Analytics and the Conference Data reports (Accepted Papers, Programme, Authors, Reviewers).

Ask a system admin. Roles are assigned in Administration → User Management, which only platform admin accounts can open — chairs run their conference's programme committee, but changing who holds which role is a platform-level action. A user can hold several roles at once and switch between them with the "Acting as" control described above. The Admin role is restricted further still: it can only be granted to a C-MRiC email address — see Account & Security.

Open the account menu (top right) and choose My Profile. You can update your name, affiliation/institution, country, and social media/ORCID at any time, and changes save immediately. Reviewers and chairs can also update their Domains of Expertise from the same page — useful if your research focus changes after you first registered, since that's what Automatic Assignment matches papers against. Your email address is your sign-in ID and can't be changed from this page.

Open the account menu (top right) and choose Account Security, then use the Change Password card — you'll need your current password, plus the new one twice. This works for every account, not just admins.

Use Forgot password? on the sign-in page. Enter your email and answer the short math check; if the address matches an account, a reset link is emailed to you (valid 60 minutes, single-use). The page shows the same message either way, so it never reveals whether an account exists for a given address.

Two-factor authentication (MFA) is required for any account with admin access — password alone isn't enough to unlock it. The first time you sign in, you'll be walked through enrollment: scan the QR code with an authenticator app (Google Authenticator, Authy, 1Password, etc.), enter the 6-digit code it shows to confirm, and you'll get 8 one-time backup codes — save those somewhere safe. Every login after that just needs your password plus the current code from your app.

Yes — it's optional for every other account, but you're welcome to enable it for extra security. Open Account Security and click Enable Two-Factor Authentication under the Two-Factor Authentication card; setup is the same QR-code process described above. Once it's on, every future login needs your authenticator code in addition to your password, exactly like an admin account. You can turn it off again at any time from the same page — that option is only hidden for admin accounts, where it's mandatory.

Use one of your 8 backup codes at the sign-in verification screen (each works once). If you've also lost those, ask a platform admin to reset your two-factor enrollment from Administration → User Management. For an admin account, MFA is mandatory so you'll set it up fresh (new QR code, new backup codes) on your next sign-in; for any other account, the reset simply turns MFA off until you choose to re-enable it from Account Security. You can also regenerate a new set of backup codes at any time while you're still signed in, without needing a reset.

Platform admin is reserved for C-MRiC staff. User Management is only reachable by an existing platform admin in the first place — chairs have no access to it — and within it the Admin role checkbox only shows up for accounts with an @c-mric.org or @c-mric.com email address. This can't be worked around by inviting someone with the role pre-set either; invitations only ever offer Reviewer or Chair.

That's a CAPTCHA — it stops automated bots from mass-creating accounts, on every registration path (author, reviewer, and accepting an invitation), as well as on Forgot password. Each question is generated fresh per attempt and can only be used once, so a wrong answer just gets you a new question to try, not a repeat of the old one. It's separate from your account details entirely, so getting it wrong never affects anything you've already typed into the rest of the form.

Access is based on your currently active role, not every role you hold. Check the "Acting as" switcher in the top bar (if you have more than one role) and make sure you've switched to the right one. If you only hold one role and still can't get in, ask a system admin to check your role under Administration → User Management.

Check spam/junk first — mail from a new sending domain is sometimes flagged initially. A chair/admin can confirm whether it actually sent via Administration → Email Log (look for a "Failed" status and reason), and can resend it from Administration → Invitations.

Use Forgot password? on the sign-in page — see Account & Security above for details. If you're already signed in and just want to update it, use Change Password under Account Security instead.

info@c-mric.org — see also our Terms of Use for data-handling and account policies.