The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) is the world's largest aerospace technical society, with a global community that spans academia, industry and government. Their meetings program exists to bring those three groups together for the exchange of ideas.
Publications from these events (which are managed on ScholarOne Conferences) are the world’s most complete source of emerging aerospace research, policy and standards.
If it's not shared, it's not done.
A core principle of AIAA's meetings is that ideas are exchanged in person across all three parts of its community. To be published, an author must not only submit a paper but also the paper must be presented at the event. This prerequisite is central to the Proceedings offering, but also creates a huge administrative burden.With thousands of sessions across multiple events, the AIAA team rely on volunteer session chairs to confirm which presentations took place and feed back important quality signals on hot topics, key papers and presenters.
The confirmation process ran on a tool external to ScholarOne Conferences, meaning chairs faced an unfamiliar interface, data was hard to keep in sync across systems and the complex process that was hard to share across the AIAA team.
As Kim Grant, Director of the Events Technical Program puts it: "It was painful. There's no other word for it."
The decision: building it together
After bringing the challenge to ScholarOne Conferences, AIAA chose to work directly with the team to develop a solution inside the ScholarOne Session Centre their chairs already knew.The design process was highly collaborative and the deep partnership between AIAA and ScholarOne Conferences paid off quickly:
"They know us, our terminology, our business and our goals" Kim says.
The end result was Post Session Review, a configurable workflow in ScholarOne Conferences allowing session chairs to submit structured feedback on each presentation. The feature, now available to all customers, lets organizers manage all aspects of set up and response collection in one place.
“Game Changer”
The simplified workflow saves AIAA days of staff effort per event, delivers an improved experience for session chairs, and reduces risk since the centralized process now runs on live data and can be shared across team members."It’s a Game Changer. I can now devote more time to working with our volunteers." - Kim Grant, Director, Events Technical Program
The ultimate goal was to strengthen the quality of AIAA's publications. Now AIAA’s Proceedings are more robust thanks to the clearer process of tying them to in-person sessions.
For AIAA, event proceedings are more than a scholarly record, they are a recognition of how their community drives a safer, more connected world. That makes linking publication to presentation much more than an efficiency gain: it puts one of the organization's core principles into practice at scale.
A platform, a community, and a partner
AIAA and ScholarOne Conferences recently renewed their partnership. For Kim, the decision was broader than event workflows: “It's also ScholarOne Manuscripts. Having all our workflows with one vendor who understands scholarly content is invaluable”Silverchair and ScholarOne’s renowned community offerings were also a key factor, as Kim explained: "The community events have opened up another world of possibilities in terms of connections - people to share ideas and best practice with"
Over the next few years, AIAA and ScholarOne Conferences plan to build on the partnership in two main areas. The first is strengthening research integrity checks within the events content pipeline, thereby extending AIAA’s commitment to quality. The second is exploring AI-driven efficiencies for conference workflows, freeing more staff time for working with the AIAA community.
Kim summarizes the prospect of enhancing AIAA’s conference workflows best “I’m excited, The future focus and collaboration we’ve seen from the ScholarOne Conferences team has been really impressive.”
Interested in learning more? Visit https://www.silverchair.com/products/scholarone-conferences/ or contact us.