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Part One: Setting Up Your Conference

After successfully installing OCS, login and select your role as Site Administrator:

User Home page with Site Administrator menu highlighted.

Next, select Hosted Conferences:

Site Administraion page with Hosted Conferences highlighted.

Then, choose Create Conference:

Conferences page with Create Conference option highlighted.

From the resulting page, fill in the form:

Conference Settings page with options to add form language, conference title, description and path.

Use this page to describe the organization operating the conference. It might be a foundation, a university department, a society or association, etc.

The “path” simply requires a few characters that will become part of the URL. Do not enter a full URL here.

Once you’ve filled in the fields, press the Save button.

From the resulting page, select the User Home link in the navigation bar:

Highlighted User Home tab leading to the Conferences page.

NOTE: If you ever do decide to use this OCS for a second organization, such as the Open Source Foundation, you could add it here.

Your account has now automatically been given the role of Conference Manager for the organization you just created. Select Conference Manager:

User Home page with a list of my conferences and an option to select Conference Manager role.

You will now see a list of choices under General Management:

Conference Site Management page with Scheduled Conferences option highlighted.

These will allow you to configure certain “site-wide” elements for the web site, including the style sheet, the header and footer, the prepared emails, and more. See OCS in an Hour for more details on these configuration options.

From the General Management menu, select Scheduled Conferences. A Scheduled Conference is an actual event, such as the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Open Access Foundation. From the resulting page, select Create Scheduled Conference:

Scheduled Conferences page with Create A Scheduled Conference option highlighted.

Fill in the form with the name of your event:

Scheduling a Conference page with fields to add conference title, acronym and path.

The acronym and path should just be a few characters. Do NOT enter a complete URL. When you’ve finished, hit the Save button. From the resulting page, select the User Home link in the navigation bar:

Highlighted User Home tab leading to the Scheduled Conferences page.

NOTE: If you ever decide to use this OCS for a second event, such as the 2011 Annual Meeting of the Open Access Foundation, you could add it here.

Select your role as Conference Manager to continue configuring this event:

User Home page with Conference Manager role highlighted.

In addition to the General Management menu options you had seen previously, you now also have a variety of menu choices for your new “scheduled conference”. See OCS in an Hour for a detailed description of filling in these fields. You have now set up your OCS conference.

Page with settings for General Management and for the Scheduled Conference.

Based upon this example, the conference URL will be: http://www.myconference.org/index.php/oaf/2010/

To get started with the review process, see Part Two: Director-Based Reviews.