Terms of service

These terms cover the use of Conference2Go — searching it, holding an account on it, and listing a conference on it. They sit alongside our privacy policy, which covers what we do with information about you, our cookie policy, and our advertising terms, which govern paid promotion only.

This text has not been reviewed by a solicitor or a data-protection specialist. It is a plain description of how this service actually works, published because operating with nothing written down is worse than publishing an unreviewed statement. A reviewed version will replace it. Where a fact is genuinely undecided, this document says so in the place the fact would have gone rather than filling the space with a plausible sentence.

1. Who we are

Conference2Go operates this directory. "We", "us" and "our" mean Conference2Go. "You" means the person using the service, and where a listing is held by an organization, that organization.

Not settled yet. The legal entity that operates Conference2Go has not been confirmed for publication, and naming one before it is would be worse than a visible gap. Ask through the contact page and we will answer in writing.

2. What this service is, and what it is not

We publish a directory of academic conferences: their names, dates, locations, submission and registration dates, the field they belong to, and a link to the conference's own website. Researchers search it and can save conferences and ask to be reminded about particular dates.

We do not run any conference listed here. We are not an organiser, a co-organiser, an agent or a party to anything between you and a conference: not a paper submission, not a registration, not a payment, not a visa letter, not a refund. Every listing links to the conference's own website, and that website is the authority on everything about it.

We do not assess the academic merit of a conference, its review process or its programme committee, and we are not qualified to. What we check is set out in clause 8.

3. The agreement, and how you enter it

Using this service means accepting these terms. There is no separate signature, and today there is no recorded click either: the sign-up pages do not ask you to agree to anything, and we do not store an acceptance against your account. We would rather write that down than imply a consent record we do not hold.

If you do not accept these terms, the remedy is to stop using the service. If you hold an account, you can export everything in it and delete it from your settings at any time, and nothing here has to be accepted first.

4. Your account

Searching, browsing, reading a conference page and reading the blog need no account and no cookie. They also work with JavaScript turned off, which is deliberate and is not going to change.

An account is needed to save a conference, tick a date so we remind you about it, follow a series, save a search, or manage a listing. Accounts are free.

An account is personal. Keep the credentials to yourself, and tell us if you think somebody else has them. You are responsible for what happens under your account, except where it happens because of something we did.

We may freeze an account, which signs it out and blocks access while something is looked into and deletes nothing, or suspend it, for the reasons in clause 5. Both are reversible and both are recorded with a reason. If either happens to you and you think it should not have, write to us through the contact page.

Staff accounts on this service require a second authentication factor. That is our obligation, not yours, and it is mentioned only because it is the reason a member of staff cannot be impersonated by a stolen password alone.

5. Acceptable use

Do not:

• submit a conference that does not exist, or a listing whose dates, fees, location or organising body are knowingly wrong;
• impersonate a conference, an institution, a society or a person, or claim a listing you have no authority over;
• use the service to send unsolicited mail to anybody, or to harvest contact details;
• scrape the site outside what our published interfaces allow, or run automated requests at a rate that degrades it for other people;
• attempt to bypass a rate limit, an authorisation check or an account boundary, or to reach data belonging to somebody else;
• upload anything unlawful, defamatory, or infringing somebody else's rights;
• file reports or appeals in bad faith, or repeatedly, in order to damage a competing conference.

A separate acceptable use policy has a page of its own. It has not been published yet, and until it is, this clause is the rule in force. When it is published it will be more detailed, not different in substance.

6. Adding a conference

Anyone with an account can add a conference, and it is free. There is no listing fee, no tier you must buy to appear, and no arrangement under which paying moves a listing up the results — see clause 12.

By submitting a listing you confirm that the conference is real, that the details are accurate as far as you know, and that you have the right to publish the text and images you supply.

A conference listed here is always a series with at least one edition, even when it has only ever happened once. That is why a one-off conference that returns the following year keeps its address instead of breaking it.

You do not need to be the organiser to add a conference. Somebody who is not the organiser can list one — that is how a directory gets built — and the organiser can take it over later under clause 10. A listing added by somebody else is not marked as inferior, and it is never ranked below a claimed one.

7. What you allow us to do with what you submit

You keep ownership of everything you submit. You give us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to store, publish, display, reformat and distribute it as part of this directory, for as long as the listing exists here.

That licence is needed for real things rather than as boilerplate, and this is the whole list of them:

• the listing's own page, the series page, search results, and field, country and city pages here;
• the field digest email, which goes only to people who asked for it;
• the embeddable widget, which an organizer installs on their own conference website;
• a machine-readable index of the catalogue we publish for automated readers, and a read-only interface that returns listing data to holders of an access key;
• reformatting into the typography, layout and image sizes of this site, and cropping or scaling an image you upload to fit them.

We may decline to publish material we consider misleading, unlawful, or damaging to the trust researchers place in this directory. We do not sell your material to anybody, and we do not license it on to a third party as a data product.

A listing is about a conference, not about you. Where you delete your account, listings you submitted stay published and your name and address come off them — see the privacy policy for exactly what that leaves.

8. Review, and our right to refuse or remove

A person reads every submission before it is published. Nothing on this site publishes itself.

There are four outcomes and each of them tells you something:

• Published. The listing goes live and you are emailed.
• Published with corrections. A moderator fixes something small — a missing city, an obvious typo — rather than sending the listing back and waiting a week. The change is recorded, you are told what was changed, and you can correct it.
• Held for information. Where something is missing or unclear we hold the listing and ask, rather than declining it. You answer on the listing itself; there is no second form and no resubmission. Answering returns the listing to review flagged as a response, and it keeps the date it originally arrived rather than going to the back of the queue.
• Declined. You are emailed the reason and the reviewer's note where they left one, and you can appeal under clause 9.

We may also unpublish a listing that is already live, where it is inaccurate, unverifiable, in breach of clause 5, or in our editorial judgment misleading to researchers.

Unpublishing works differently from declining and we would rather say so than let you assume otherwise. The reason is recorded in our audit log, but today we neither email it to you nor put an appeal form on your screen. Ask through the contact page and we will tell you the reason and look at the decision again.

A listing is never deleted. An unpublished listing keeps its address and shows a page explaining its state, because past pages hold links and history and an address that once worked here should not break. Editions that have ended leave search and keep their pages.

Every decision above is written to an audit log with who made it, what changed and when. That record is what an appeal is answered from.

9. Appeals

Where a submission is declined, you can appeal it from your events screen.

There is one appeal per decision. It is read again, by a different moderator where staffing allows — the person who made the original decision is recorded so that routing away from them is possible rather than aspirational, and where it was not recorded, the case shows that. Where an appeal succeeds the listing returns to the review queue rather than going straight onto the site.

A submission declined a second time is a new decision and can be appealed again.

While an appeal, a report dispute or an ownership dispute is open, the public state of the listing does not change. The public should not see an internal argument. The exception is a claim that a listing is impersonating somebody, which is fast-tracked, because the harm there falls on a third party who may have no account here.

Repeated appeals are visible to us as a count. They are not treated as a judgement about you.

10. Claiming a listing

If a listing for your conference already exists, you can claim it and take over the editing. Claiming is free, and it changes nothing about where the listing ranks.

The quickest route is an email address on the conference's own domain or its host institution's; a departmental subdomain counts, because that is the normal academic shape. That is evidence, not authority — nothing here approves a claim automatically, because a matching domain is exactly what somebody registering a lookalike domain would also have. Where that route is not open, a verification line added to the conference website works, and a person checks it.

The listing stays live and unchanged throughout a claim, and throughout a dispute between two claimants. Where somebody else claims a listing that is already held, that becomes an ownership case which a person decides on the evidence from both sides, and the listing does not move while it runs.

Where a claim is refused, the claim's own status page gives you the outcome. There is no appeal form on that screen today, and clause 9 does not cover it: write to us through the contact page and a person will look at it again.

11. Reporting a listing

Any reader can report a listing from its page. A person reads every report.

If your listing is reported, you can answer in one of two ways, and they are different things. You can dispute the report, which opens a case somebody has to decide; or you can accept it and correct the listing, which is not a dispute and does not open one.

A report that is not upheld is not held against you. Nothing here scores a listing, or a person, by how many reports it has attracted, and nothing about a report changes where a listing ranks.

12. Paid promotion

Organizers may buy labelled promotion. What is sold, what it costs and how it is delivered are in the advertising terms and on the pricing page, and nothing about promotion is part of these terms except the following commitment, which belongs here because it is a promise to readers rather than to buyers.

Paid promotion has no effect on organic ranking. Paid placements sit in a separate, visibly labelled region and carry a promotion label wherever they appear. Promotion is never a condition of being listed. A listing nobody has paid for is not demoted, delayed or deprioritised, and an unclaimed listing is not downranked for being unclaimed. We do not sell the removal, demotion or suppression of any listing, at any price, to anybody.

This is enforced structurally rather than by policy alone: the code that orders search results cannot read campaign or promotion data. It is not passed in, and there is nothing there for it to weigh.

13. Accuracy, availability and change

We check that a conference exists and that its details are coherent. We do not warrant that any listing is accurate, that any conference will take place, or that anything published by an organiser here is true.

Dates and fees change on organisers' websites without telling us. Before you book travel, pay a fee or rely on a submission date, check it at the conference's own website, which every listing links to. Where an organiser tells us a conference has been cancelled or postponed, we email everybody who saved it or ticked one of its dates, and the reminders stop — but we can only pass on what we are told, and we are not liable for a change we were not told about.

We aim to keep the service available and we do not guarantee it. We may change, suspend or withdraw any part of it. Where a change materially reduces something you have paid for, the advertising terms say what happens.

14. Liability

Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited or excluded.

Beyond that, and to the extent the law allows:

• we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, and specifically not for lost travel or accommodation costs, a missed submission date, a rejected paper, a refused visa, lost registrations or lost revenue;
• where you have paid us for promotion, our total liability in connection with that campaign is limited to the amount you paid for it, as the advertising terms already say.

Not settled yet. What our total liability is to somebody who has paid us nothing — a fixed cap, or no cap at all — is not decided, and a figure is not invented here. Using this service free of charge does not currently carry a stated cap.

Nothing here affects the rights of a consumer that cannot be excluded by agreement.

15. Ending this agreement

You can stop using the service at any time, and you can delete your account from your settings. Two things have to be cleared first, and the settings page names whichever applies to you: an unpaid invoice, which is a record we are separately obliged to keep, and a listing that would be left with nobody able to correct it, because a live conference must always have somebody who can fix a wrong date.

We may suspend or close an account for a breach of clause 5, or where we are required to. Where we do, we record the reason, and you can ask us for it.

Deleting an account does not remove listings you submitted, does not remove invoices, and does not empty the audit log. The privacy policy sets out exactly what is removed, what is pseudonymised and what survives, and why.

Clauses 7, 13, 14 and 17 survive the end of this agreement.

16. Changes to these terms

If these terms change materially we will publish the new version, say so, and keep the earlier version readable. A version is what somebody relied on, so it is never edited in place — a correction is a new version with its own number and date, and the version and date are printed at the top of this page.

17. Law, and where a dispute is decided

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales. Where you are a consumer resident elsewhere, this does not remove the protection of the mandatory law of the country you live in.

Not settled yet. Which courts have jurisdiction, and whether a dispute goes anywhere before a court, are not decided. This document will not name a venue that has not been chosen.

If any clause is found invalid, the rest stand. A failure by us to enforce a clause is not a waiver of it.

18. Getting in touch

Everything goes through the contact page, and we answer in writing. A message sent there is given a reference you can quote.