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I have just assigned to find a solution for building an academic conference site as quick as possible. I used to be authors and also reviewer assistant but I have never been an organizer. This is my first time in this area. Anyway, it seems there are many softwares available right now. Below are just a list I found in Google.

1. BYU Paper Review System - This one is very old and maybe obsolete for so long. The most interesting thing I found is that it was written in C as external PHP module.
2. MyReview - It has just released the latest feature-rich version last month.

I don't have much time to find more but it seems MyReview is one of the most popular player. Anyway, my favorite CMS is Drupal and most of our sites are Drupalized. It would be nice if we can build an academic conference site using Drupal. And I found Conference module for Drupal.

At the first glance, I thought Conference module just provides necessary new node types for building paper review system. However, I have just found that this module is one of the most powerful module in the huge list of contributions at Drupal. Below are what I found.

1. Conference module provides 2 new node types, conference_paper and conference_review.
2. You are allowed to specify specific node types for paper and review. They may be created in CCK.
3. Granting permission to create/upload is supported by Drupal itself.
4. Upload mechanism is also provided by Drupal.
5. Menu permission is controlled by roles.
6. You may notify or reminder reviewers via e-mail.

Installation from scratch is pretty simple and straightforward. I finished the installation within 20 minutes including getting the latest version of Drupal and Conference. If you have to build a conference site, you may give it a try.

Tags: drupal, academic conference, paper review system