Imagine a little horror story: You, a researcher, wake up one morning feeling old and tired and remembering an earlier, more ambitious version of yourself. What went wrong? You recall your first bad choice of a conference, a meeting you attended as a graduate student where nobody understood your research project; you remember all the time that you spent reviewing myriads of conference submissions without ever getting any credit for it; you remember how you lost more and more colleagues who just went away to attend a conference and never came back… because they chose a suitable one, met the right people there and ended up moving on to better places. And you ask yourself if you could have been spared all this misery if you had a tool that would have helped you identifying the conferences that were right for you. Our initiative aims to develop an interdisciplinary, open and reliable service for finding and publishing data on scientific conferences. Following the FAIR principles, one of its objectives is to assign persistent identifiers for conferences. It will also identify quality criteria for conferences and represent them in their environment: as part of a network of institutions, researchers, other conferences, proceedings etc. This will help not only to reduce ambiguity of conference titles but also to give researchers more acknowledgement for conference related work.
