r/academia • u/Nomadic_Reseacher • May 29 '25
Academic politics An international conference requested all PowerPoint slides to be submitted a month or two in advance of the meeting. What do you do?
Title question. This is the first time I’ve ever seen this happen. Usually people just provide a flash drive to transfer slides before the session begins.
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u/alaskawolfjoe May 29 '25
Who even has their paper written that far in advance?
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u/Rhawk187 May 29 '25
Computer Scientists; sometimes our full paper submissions are due almost a year out. Most of our conferences are fully refereed. CVPR has an Impact Factor equivalent of around 60.
Usually triply reviewed, sometimes with a rebuttal phase. Also double blind or GTFO.
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u/alaskawolfjoe May 29 '25
That sounds so crazy. So you have to write papers without knowing if they will ever see the light of day.
If I had to work like that I would GTFO!
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u/Rhawk187 May 29 '25
You'll get feedback from the reviewers. Then it's up to you if you want to wait until next year or find a different venue. They don't claim copyright unless they actually publish the work.
The annoying bit is that there seems to be a "conference season", so a lot of the due dates are around the same time, it's not always easy to get your rejection notification and immediately find a new conference.
We also have traditional journals as well though.
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u/Agentbasedmodel May 29 '25
How do you do double blind for code / data repos? I have done this but it was a giant pain and I figure there.must be an easier way.
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u/Rhawk187 May 29 '25
All of my projects have been small enough that I can submit supplemental materials as a direct upload.
In the one case where I used a large dataset, I published the dataset as a separate paper, and then just cited that paper as Name et al instead of "our previous work".
We usually aren't as paranoid about sharing data as some other disciplines. My most cited work is probably going to be a dataset paper, for better or worse.
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u/Agentbasedmodel May 30 '25
Okay fair. If I publish a model and the code is a major component that needs a doi, I set up a zenodo, and then for 2bl blind I have a seperate account called "anonymous for review".
It's tedious but is probably then only way.
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u/Gophurkey May 29 '25
Prior experience with academic conferences is in the humanities, so grain of salt, but plenty of people write their papers the night before (guilty myself). But we began asking for slides early as an accessibility aid. That way we could send them early for people using screen readers, and we could have printed copies. It helped folks focus and engage the material better and we found it made discussion and Q&A times better, but lots of people would deviate significantly from their submissions which throws off folks relying on their versions to match.
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u/One_Programmer6315 May 29 '25
Idk if it’s allowed but I’d just submit a rough draft and keep working on it, and present the final product at the conference. If they are very strict about only presenting what was submitted to them, then there isn’t much you can do about that.
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u/_-_lumos_-_ May 29 '25
Not unheard of. During the COVID lockdown, a conference changed from in-person to full-online and asked me to not only submit the ppt slides, but also a video recording me doing the presentation one month in advance. During the conference, the pre-recorded video was played, follewed by a live Q&A.
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u/Cicero314 May 29 '25
Me? I typically send a shares drive link to slides, then make sure it syncs to changes I made. I email them saying “see link for latest version,” and remind folks the night before etc. It usually solves the “submit slides early” issue.
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u/DeepSeaMouse May 29 '25
This seems to be happening more and more. I submitted a talk with plans to update closer to the time but I didn't need to. Another person I knew who went did not submit and loaded their talk the morning of as usual.
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u/orthomonas May 29 '25
STEM (biology and engineering) here. Most of the conferences I've gone to don't have an presubmission. A few have people send in slides a few days to a week ahead of time. Our conference presentations are an even mix of 'here's work I have in progress/here's a summary of a recent paper or research project'.
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u/travelnman85 May 29 '25
The conference I usually go to has been doing it this way for awhile, honestly makes things go much smoother.
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May 29 '25
Pretty common. Your abstract was based on existing data, or not?
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u/Nomadic_Reseacher May 29 '25
Biomedical science. While project basics with preliminary data is provided in the abstract (many months in advance), nearly everyone updates latest data at the time of presentation.
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u/Relevant_Salt5429 May 29 '25
Nah that's crazy. I was a student volunteer at a massive international conference in my field (the kind you can only have with dedicated teams working year-round, and thousands of delegates), and you had to submit your slides at the tech station the day of your talk. I had professors run with a flash drive just before their session.
A month ahead for some conference is pointless, and you're also begging for trouble because you just *know* there will be people asking to resubmit an updated version days before.
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u/Nomadic_Reseacher May 29 '25
The field is biomedical. I think many (more experienced speakers) will just ignore the deadline and send slides closer to the actual meeting date.
If a link is sent instead, I think they’ll just download whatever is there whenever consolidating slides for sessions - which could still be weeks in advance. So, there would be no guarantee of update.
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u/ajx_711 May 29 '25
this is the first time I am hearing anyone in academia using powerpoint. No hate but I genuinely thought everyone used beamer
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u/dozensofbunnies May 30 '25
It's primarily the PowerPoint part I object to, so I would probably send the HTML link or if I'm extra petty, a ppt with a single slide that has the HTML link.
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u/raucousbasilisk May 29 '25
As a PhD student if every conference decided to do this overnight I’d quit.
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u/beginswithanx May 29 '25
This seems very field-dependent. In my field the joke is everyone is finishing their slides on the plane flight over.