Key terms

Three things sit inside each other. An organization runs conferences and journals. Each of them receives submissions. Understand these three and the rest follows.

Organization or community     a university, society, company, or the free Quorum Press Community
└── Conference or journal     also a workshop or a collection
    └── Submission            a full paper, abstract, poster, review, short communication or explainer

The words

Word	What it means
Organization / Community	The body that owns conferences and journals, a team and a plan. The free one that anybody can use is the Quorum Press Community.
Conference or journal	What organizers run: a conference, a journal, a workshop or a collection. Each receives submissions and runs peer review, and is always created under an organization.
Conference	An event with dates: it has a programme, sessions, badges and certificates.
Journal	Receives submissions all year and publishes them as they are accepted, with no dates of its own.
Workshop	A small, focused event.
Collection	A chosen set of papers, such as a special issue.
Open call	A conference or journal that is taking submissions now. Open calls is where you find somewhere to submit.
Submission	A piece of work sent to a conference or journal. Its kind can be a full paper, an abstract, a poster, a review, a short communication or an explainer article.
Track / Theme	A topic group inside a conference or journal, for example “Energy” or “Health”. Authors choose one. It groups work in the programme and the book of abstracts.
Tracking code	A short code that names one submission, for example K7RM2Q. Quote it for payments, in messages, and at conference check-in. Reviewers see it too, on each manuscript they are given, so an editor and a reviewer can name a manuscript without naming its authors.
Review	A reviewer’s scores and comments on a submission.
Round	One cycle of review. A revision opens round 2, then round 3, and so on.
Decision	The editor’s outcome for a round: accept, ask for a revision, or reject.
Published	Made public and open access, at a page anyone can read and cite.
Book of abstracts	The accepted work of a conference in one book, on the web and as a PDF.
Registration fee	What some conferences ask the authors of accepted work to pay. It is paid to the conference, never to Quorum Press.

Who is who

Role	What they do
Corresponding author	Manages a submission and is the one who submits it. There can be more than one.
Co-author	Sees the submission and can suggest changes to it.
Reviewer	Reads a submission they are assigned and reports on it.
Editor	Assigns reviewers, reads the reviews, and decides.
Organizer	Runs the conference or journal: opens and closes the call, the programme, the participants.
Registration desk	Checks payments against the conference’s records. Sees no manuscripts, reviews or decisions.
Organization admin	Helps run an organization and all its conferences and journals.

One person can hold several of these at once, on the same conference or journal, or on different ones.