What are conference proceedings? A guide for organizers

After the closing ceremony, what happens to the knowledge exchanged, the arguments started, and the work presented at a scientific conference? The answer is its proceedings. Without them, an edition of the event exists only in the memory of the people who were in the room, and the debate goes into hiatus until the next one.

This guide covers what conference proceedings are, what goes into them, how they have been published over the years, and what changes when they go online with a DOI.

What are conference proceedings?

Conference proceedings are the published collection of the work presented at a congress, conference, or symposium. They are the most common way to record what was presented, and they normally gather only the submissions approved by the scientific committee, so they carry the weight of an evaluation rather than a list of everything that was sent in.

Two things make them useful. They are a historical document of an edition of the event, the approved submissions and the discussion around them. And they are a snapshot of the state of the art in a field at a specific moment, which is what makes them worth consulting later.

In Portuguese and Spanish the same publication is called anais or actas. There is no technical difference. Proceedings is the English term.

What goes into the proceedings

Full papers or abstracts?

The content depends on the organizing committee and the scientific committee. Proceedings can carry abstracts, extended abstracts, or the authors’ full papers.

Consider two real examples from conferences published on the Galoa proceedings platform. The 18th World Congress of Applied Linguistics (AILA) published its proceedings online with the abstracts of the work presented. The 21st Brazilian Congress of Chemical Engineering (COBEQ) published proceedings with the option to download the full papers.

Everything presented, or a selection?

This is an editorial decision. At most conferences, everything effectively presented goes into the proceedings, which means the submissions that were approved but never presented are excluded.

Other conferences select a portion of the total. The 17th International Conference on Near Infrared Spectroscopy (NIR 2015) took that route, publishing a selection rather than the full set.

Do lectures and workshops count?

Any scientific production presented during the event can go into the proceedings. Posters and oral sessions are included in most cases. Lectures, round tables, and short courses are included when the committee decides they belong in the record. The 6th Brazilian Conference on Natural Products (BCNP) published lecture content under a dedicated “Lectures” track. The 14th Brazilian Congress of Family and Community Medicine (CBMFC) went further, and its proceedings can be filtered by presentation format and by disease and patient codes.

Can the same work be submitted to two conferences?

Authors need a clear answer here, because duplicate submission can end in an allegation of self-plagiarism.

If you are an author and the restriction is not spelled out in the submission rules, contact the organizing committee of the conference you intend to submit to before you send anything. The risk is an accusation of self-plagiarism, and it is not worth taking on a guess.

If you are organizing, the answer comes from your own editorial goals. In our experience with national and international conferences, most require that submissions be previously unpublished. Large congresses and symposia such as SLACAN (the Latin American Symposium on Food Science and Nutrition) and CIDESPORT (the International Congress on Port Performance) select the best submissions for publication in international journals, and they verify that the work is unpublished precisely to protect that route and the standing of the event.

How organizers verify this varies. Some ask for a declaration from the author at submission. Some attach a form assigning publication rights to the event. Undergraduate research tracks often require a letter from the advisor authorizing publication in the proceedings.

The advice is the same in every case. State in the call for papers whether the work must be unpublished, and state how you will check. Whether that is a form, a letter, or a declaration at submission time, decide it before the call opens, not after the first dispute.

How proceedings are published

Proceedings used to be books. Printed volumes, laid out much like journals, one fascicle per edition. Many Brazilian conferences adopted the international Proceedings Series format, with each edition carrying its own issue.

Those books ran to hundreds of pages and were conceptually dense. Picture the proceedings of a flagship conference, thousands of submissions in one volume, and a scientist trying to find the three papers relevant to their work. The record existed, but consulting it was work.

Then came CD-ROMs, handed out to attendees. Lighter than the books, but CDs scratch, and a scratched CD is a lost publication. They are also on their way out, since fewer and fewer laptops ship with a drive that reads them. Some conferences moved to USB drives instead. More storage, more durable, and easy to brand with the identity of the event, but they cost more and attendees lose them, which undercuts the point of distributing the work.

Publishing online solved the distribution problem. You share a link, and every attendee reaches the proceedings without the risk of losing the publication with a piece of hardware. If the proceedings are open access, the wider public reaches them too, which extends the reach of both the research and the event.

“Our motivation in making the proceedings available online and with a DOI was to increase reach and to let this work be retrieved and seen anywhere in the world. So that people could, as far as possible, assess the quality of what is presented here at UNICAMP.”

Prof. Dr. Fernando Coelho (Unicamp)

“Because this is a large-scale global event, with more than 93 countries involved and 2,500 submissions, publishing online is a practical way to disseminate the work and gives everyone easy access.”

WONCA organizing committee

Do proceedings need a DOI?

Depositing DOIs for the work in your proceedings is not mandatory. It is strongly recommended, because it gives each work a persistent identifier and makes it easier to find, link to, and cite.

The DOI identifies a digital scientific publication and provides a managed, persistent link to the author’s work. Files move, sites are rebuilt, and platforms are replaced. A DOI keeps resolving through all of that, provided its registered URL and metadata are kept current, and keeping them current is part of what a deposit service owes you. The conference can also keep its own identity and deposit under its own prefix, so the record is recognizable as yours.

This is where technical compliance stops being a detail. Incomplete or inaccurate metadata reduces discoverability and breaks the connections indexing services rely on. Galoa has been a Crossref Sponsor since 2015 and an ORCID institutional member since 2025, which is how we make sure your proceedings meet the deposit standards and that authorship is attributed to the right person, not to a name that happens to look similar.

Proceedings, journal articles, and preprints

Proceedings are good at starting discussion. Like preprints, they publish quickly. Unlike preprints, they carry peer review.

A preprint is a manuscript that has not been through peer review. The author publishes it independently, to gather criticism from colleagues or to contribute to a debate already under way.

Work submitted to a scientific conference goes through peer review by the scientific committee, and only what is approved enters the proceedings. The same principle applies to journal articles, except that there the review is usually more extensive and can involve a long cycle of revisions to meet the editor’s expectations, sometimes taking years to reach publication. Proceedings sit between the two: faster than a journal, and reviewed by the committee on the way in.

Like a journal, proceedings are a collection of work around a shared subject. The Brazilian Congress of Special Education gathers work on the many aspects of special education. The International Conference on Plasmodium vivax Research brings researchers from around the world to discuss one vector of malaria. In both cases the proceedings draw the field’s boundary for that year.

Why publishing proceedings matters

For the conference, publishing establishes the event in its field. Each edition draws more people who want to take part, and the research reaches further than the room it was presented in.

For authors, the proceedings are an additional channel of publication and dissemination for their research. Offering good proceedings is offering more value to the scientists who chose your call for papers, and it strengthens the relationship between them and your congress. On the Galoa proceedings platform, authors and co-authors can see the access statistics for each of their published works, which gives them a concrete view of the impact of what they presented.

For everyone else, proceedings are a way into a subject, and how a researcher new to a field finds out what that field is currently arguing about.

The knowledge your conference produced deserves to outlive the closing ceremony, in a form the community can find, read, and cite.