EasyChair: Frequently Asked Questions

This page contains basic facts about EasyChair.

Account Creation and Submission

How do I create an EasyChair account? We have a detailed help article explaining account creation.

How do I submit a paper? We have a detailed help article explaining how to submit.

Can I install EasyChair on my server? No. EasyChair is a Web service. We host it on a high-performance server.

Licenses and Support

Is EasyChair free? We use a freemium business model. Read about our licenses for more information.

What level of support is included in the standard free installation? Helpdesk support is only available to our paid customers.

Performance

Is EasyChair fast enough to handle large conferences and program committee meetings? Yes. We use an original implementation technique that is dozens of times faster than implementations of Web services using standard PHP/MySQL technology. The largest conference we managed had close to 5,000 submissions. In our peak time we receive over 6,000 submissions per day.

Can EasyChair work with large submissions? Yes. We use a 1Gbps network. This means that we are able to accept over 300 standard size submissions per second. This also means we are able to handle conferences dealing with very large submissions, such as videos.

Non-English version

Can we use EasyChair in languages different from English? Yes and no. The information EasyChair stores is stored in Unicode, so it can be in any language, for example, Chinese or French. However, all instructions on EasyChair pages are in English. A multi-language version is under development.

Customization

Can EasyChair be customized? EasyChair is highly customizable. It has a number of options allowing conference organizers to choose a model suitable for their conference. These options include submission, reviewing and proceedings creation. When a new conference is created, it is immediately ready to accept submissions using a standard configuration. This configuration can be changed by the conference administrators (chairs) at any time.

EasyChair does not have some features our conference needs, what should we do? Contact us. We might be able to implement what you need. We have a wish list of EasyChair enhancements and improvements, and often rearrange our priorities, especially when this is required by our premium customers.

Reliability and security

Is EasyChair available 24/7? Yes. EasyChair is running 24/7/365. Our uptime is over 99.99%.

We are afraid to lose our conference data. What are your backup and recovery procedures? We use a technique known as database replication to keep your data safe. We have live replicas of all data on three additional backup servers. This means that, in the case that we have a total server crash, we should be able to recover data using one of the backup servers. For peace of mind you can also use our non-free licenses which allow you to download copies of all your conference data.

Other

How often are new versions of EasyChair released? We use agile programming technology with no major releases. We make several updates per day on average. They are made seamlessly, without stopping EasyChair.