About UMS
Muhammadiyah University of Surakarta (UMS) is one of the largest Islamic universities in Indonesia, known for its dedication to quality education and innovative research. Established in 1957, UMS continues to improve its academic quality and facilities to support the needs of students and lecturers. In the field of publication, UMS currently has 63 journals that have achieved various prestigious indexes, including Scopus and DOAJ at the international level, and SINTA at the national level.
Universitas Muhammadiyah Surakarta (UMS) is also very active in organizing seminars and conferences. Every year, UMS has held more than 20 such events, which have always succeeded in attracting the interest of many authors and researchers to participate. The success of these events cannot be separated from the consistency of UMS in organizing them routinely every year.
What type of tools and platform is used ?
For Journal Publication
In the field of journal publications, UMS uses OJS as their platform for publishing articles, and as we know that the OJS platform is one of the most widely used free platforms by users all-around in the world, with good support from PKP as the creator of OJS and active community contributions in the forum makes this platform easy to adopt by many people, this platform is also specifically designed to support all indexing needs.
For Seminar and Conference
In the past three years, UMS has experimented with various platforms to manage its seminars and conferences. They have tried several alternatives, including WordPress, Conftools, Google Forms, Zoom and OJS platform. The purpose of using alternatives to the platforms above is:
1. WordPress
For conference platform examples, on the ICETIA 2024 conference site, the management uses the WordPress platform to handle the appearance of the information site and as we know, the flexibility of WordPress allows users to customize the appearance of their conference landing page very easily.
2. Conftool
In a conference event that is held, there are usually activities of receiving and managing papers, of course this process is not possible to do or design using WordPress, so as an alternative UMS uses a third-party Conference platform app such as Conftools, by using Conftools all processes such as submitting, reviewing and assessing a paper can be done effectively and efficiently, plus because this platform is specifically designed for conference management, several additional features such as participant settings, scheduling and automatic email are very helpful for managers and editors.
3. Google Form
Every conference that is held usually finds an do a registration and payment activity, in this process sometimes some conferences have many types of each user who registers, for example, such as author, participant, presenter and co-host, of course each type has a variation in the difference in registration fees, therefore to facilitate management in filtering registered users, management will usually create a specific data form that can be filled in by the user according to the package they choose, and generally on some conference platforms this form feature is not available and cannot be freely customized by the editor. Therefore, many editors use Google forms as a solution to overcome this deficiency.
4. Zoom
Many types of conferences are held using a hybrid mode where the conference is conducted offline and online, for offline usually participants will gather in one place such as a hotel or ballroom, but for participants who register online will participate by following online using virtual video.
Especially for handling online usually the committee will provide a kind of virtual conference which generally usually uses zoom as the Best virtual conference platform. Although to get essential features and unlimited use we have to subscribe, on the other hand zoom also provides a Free virtual conference that can be used as a first step.
5. Open Journal System (OJS)
Generally, if a third-party platform does not provide a publish proceedings feature, many editors publish proceedings using OJS as an alternative to their proceeding papers.
So what is the reason for UMS to change platforms?
From the explanation above, we can see that organizing a seminar or conference requires various tools, platforms, and people who understand the technical aspects of using the system. In addition, some third-party platforms used are paid and do not provide paper publication features as proceedings. As a result, the organizer must move the paper to the OJS system, which is often used by many conference organizers.
In addition, for those who use WordPress as a conference landing page platform, they often face difficulties in maintaining and archiving data from completed conferences. Moreover, when preparing for the next conference, they usually have to do the setup from beginning, such as installing WordPress and other preparations which are certainly very time-consuming.
Due to these considerations, the UMS team decided to try replacing the tools and platforms they previously used with the Leconfe Platform, and what solutions were provided? See the information below.
What solutions does Leconfe provide?
After successfully installing and setting up Leconfe, Leconfe has provided many solutions that address various issues experienced with the previous management system. Here are the main solutions provided by Leconfe:
1. Multiconference
With Leconfe, creating multiple conferences can be done easily, this can be intended so that the committee can organize various conferences without having to move between different systems, also allowing for more efficient data management. All conference-related information, such as participants, presenters, and submitted papers, are stored in one system. Not only that, with multiconferences in one system, it will be easier to maintain and update the platform.
2. Conference site page
If previously the committee created their conference website page with WordPress, then by using Leconfe the creation of web pages has been provided completely and easily. Not only that, Leconfe also provides several alternative choices of basic themes that can be used for free. No special skills are needed to apply this theme because all tutorials have been provided completely.
3. Workflow submission
Leconfe is specifically designed to facilitate conference management, by providing a structured paper submission workflow. This feature allows organizers to easily receive, review, and process papers up to the production stage. All of these processes are integrated into the Leconfe application, so no third-party applications are needed to manage these stages. Additionally, Leconfe includes an automated email notification system, ensuring authors and participants receive regular updates throughout the process.
4. Payment
Leconfe offers a payment feature that allows authors and participants to make payments automatically or manually. Currently, automatic payments are available through PayPal, but the platform is also designed to be compatible with other payment gateways such as Xendit, Midtrans, and others.
5. Proceeding
After the conference is finish, the organizers can publish all accepted papers through the proceedings feature available in Leconfe. This makes the publication process more efficient compared to publishing papers in separate proceedings. In addition, authors can also easily track the status of their submitted papers. All papers published in Leconfe proceedings can also be indexed by Google Scholar.
6. User Management
Leconfe provides roles for each registered user, allowing administrators to set access based on their respective roles. With this system, access rights can be adjusted according to the user’s position, making it easier to determine the person in charge of each conference. In addition, Leconfe offers a user data export feature for completed conferences, which makes it easier to send LOAs or notifications in bulk and to specific registered users.
Conclusion
After deciding to replace the old conference platform with Leconfe, UMS said that they have gained a lot of convenience and time efficiency, especially in terms of maintenance. Previously, they had to manage various platforms and supporting tools, but now they can focus on just one platform. In addition, in terms of cost, Leconfe is much cheaper because this platform can be used for free. However, to ensure a smooth migration, UMS decided to choose a support package, so they can communicate directly with the developer if they encounter difficulties.
So far, in the last 3 months, UMS has successfully organized 5 conferences. Of these, one conference has been completed, two others are in the process of accepting papers, and two more conferences are still in the preparation stage.