Convening a panel is a great opportunity, but also a serious responsibility – to presenting colleagues, the conference, the field. We have tried to itemise below the various aspects of convenors’ work we’d like you to keep in mind over the conference process. Please get in touch if you have questions or need further clarification on any of this.
The call for papers has been launched as a fully open call, meaning that all panels, workshops and roundtables are open to all proposals, not only known colleagues from the convenors’ previous networks. If your proposal has pre-identified particular papers or presenters, we would ask you to redraft the language so that you can consider other papers that might be submitted to your submission in this open call.
We would like you to:
- ensure you’ve read the Call for Proposals page
- facilitate publicising the call for papers from your end
- be prompt on marking up your papers (but only once the call closes at 23:59 EEST/UTC+03:00 on October 07 2025 – please do NOT mark any before the deadline!)
- communicate closely with your authors and discussants/chairs, answering their questions, reminding them to register, figuring out the best sequence of presentations, advising newcomers on the length of presentations, discussing scheduling, keeping your eye on author and discussant/chair registrations and marking up and informing us of withdrawals
- ask your colleagues and students to submit paper abstracts on time, not at the last minute, as the inevitable rush on the final day of the deadline creates unnecessary stress
- if you plan to have a proposal yourself in your own panel/roundtable, remember to submit that also before the Call closes (for workshops this is not required)
Advice for Mergers
The ECSA2026 Conference Organisation Team decided to organise a Q&A session to address questions regarding the merging of the topics. The aim was to ensure that all aspects are clear and to provide those with a merged panel the opportunity to raise any concerns directly with the ECSA2026 Conference Organisation Team. Please read the following document with all answered questions.
Call for papers
The call for papers will close at 23:59 EEST/UTC+03:00 on October 07 2025. The call will be widely publicised by email and posted on social media platforms; however, please circulate the call to lists you are members of, in your department, professional networks etc. You can use the wording sent out in our Call announcement, or simply refer colleagues to the CFP page on the website. If you wish to share a link specifically to your panel, workshop or roundtable then having navigated to your topic in the programme explorer and clicked to expand the text, click on the ‘Share’ button 
Ask your colleagues and students to submit paper abstracts in time, not at the last minute, as the inevitable rush on the final day of the deadline creates unnecessary stress. If you plan to have a proposal yourself in your own panel/roundtable, remember to submit that also before the Call closes (for workshops this is not required).
All proposals must be made via the online system, and not via email. If approached by email, please direct proposers to the website. The ‘To propose a paper, click here’ button beneath the instructions on the Call for proposals page takes the visitor to the list of panels.
There is a ‘Propose paper’ button in the title section of each open panel. Alongside this is a notification of how many papers have been proposed to that panel. Panel convenors are sent an automated notification when a proposal is made, but it is possible the notification will end up in your spam box. If you have the facility to do so within your email, it would be useful to whitelist email addresses from the ecsa2026.ngo and nomadit.co.uk domains. But do not worry if you can’t do this, as the best place to view the proposals is via our login environment (see below).
Panel/session length
Panel sessions will last 105 minutes and include a maximum of 5 participants. Usually we allow panels to have up to 2 sessions (10 papers) though certain panels might have more if necessary.
Please note: we will inform convenors of regular panels how many sessions their panel can be allocated at the end of the paper selection process post-CFP. This will take into account how many proposals have been received across all panels, workshops and roundtables and the conference’s space/time constraints.
Panel, workshop and roundatble details
To view your panel, workshop or roundtable go to the ECSA 2026 website and click on ‘Login’ (upper right corner), using your email and password when prompted to enter the platform. We suggest ticking ‘Remember me’ to stay logged in, if using your own computer, as this makes life easier later.
Once logged in, ‘Log in’ becomes ‘Logged in’ with a drop-down menu. Select ‘conference’ there and scroll till you see your ECSA panel title. Click the title to drill down into the detail: title, abstracts and, listed below, any paper proposals.
If you update any fields, remember to click the ‘Save’ button. At this stage the ‘status’ of all proposals is ‘Pending’.
Marking up your panels, workshops or roundatbles once the CFP closes
Please do not make any decisions about which proposals to accept before the CFP ends (October 07 2025). Given that most colleagues work to the deadline, do not worry unduly if your complement of papers seems a little low – most proposals arrive during the final 24 hours of the call.
You can view and even edit individual paper proposals by clicking the eye/pencil icon in the paper titles. However, to read all the proposals you have received, click the ‘Download Paper Review Sheet’ button at the top of the page, to download a PDF of all the proposals.
The CFP is public, so you may receive proposals from people you do not know: please treat all proposals as equally as you can, and do not only accept the proposals you have solicited directly.
At the bottom of the page you will see five coloured boxes with options for the papers:
All the papers will start in the grey “Pending Papers” box. You can drag and drop papers to the different boxes depending on your decision, then click on “Save” to finalise the decision. You can also click on “Reset/Refresh” if you want to start over. Please drag the papers into the order in which you initially wish them to be presented.
- Accepted and Rejected are self explanatory, to indicate if you wish to simply accept or reject a paper.
- Withdrawn is for when authors inform you or us that they are no longer able to proceed with that proposal or attend the conference. They do not always email us with this news so if you receive such information later in the process, please remember to move their papers to ‘Withdrawn’, so that we know, too.
- Transfer is for papers you would like to accept but don’t have space for, or don’t wish to accept perhaps because they aren’t on your theme, but feel should be included somewhere in the conference. We will try to rehouse the transfer papers in other panels. Please do not set anything to transfer simply because you feel bad about rejecting – if the abstract is of really poor quality, they should not be dragged through the transfer process and possibly end up being rejected again twice over.
Please mark up all proposals by October 22, do not leave any as ‘pending’. After moving all papers, click on the ‘Save’ button beneath the list. All accepted papers will immediately show on your public panel page on the conference website, beneath the panel abstract.
Emailing authors – VERY IMPORTANT!
When you mark up a paper, the decision will show in the author’s Cocoa. However Cocoa does not send an email to the author alerting them of the status change, so please do your colleagues the courtesy of sending them an email informing them of your decision.
To make this easier click the ‘Send email’ button at the top of the panel edit page and choose which subsets of authors you wish to write to, and which method you wish to use to generate an email.
Subsequent actions
When all convenor decisions have been made and transfers done, we will allocate your panel the appropriate number of sessions.
If you are aware of any limitations to the timetabling of your panel, workshop or roundtable please then state those in the ‘Requested timing’ field of the panel edit page. Note that we are already aware via our software of participants’ dual roles as convenors, presenters, chairs or discussants.
Once we’ve allocated your panel the requisite number of sessions, please return to the panel edit page to drag papers into the different sessions and/or to update the presentation order.
As convenors you have editorial control over your contributors’ papers. We will not proof the abstracts, so please ensure that both your authors and yourselves check their abstracts once you’ve accepted them.
Prior circulation of papers
ECSA does not require prior circulation of papers; however if you wish to do this for your panel, the panel page can help avoid a lot of emailing to and fro: each author can upload a PDF of their paper (not of their abstract!) into their paper edit page and this is then available to co-panelists for download from your panel page on the site. If you subsequently wish these to be available more widely, please let us know so we can alter their visibility to delegates or public.