AAS 2018 Call for Proposals Is Open—Now Powered by CadmiumCD

The AAS is now accepting proposal submissions for our 2018 annual conference, which will be held March 22-25 in Washington, D.C. The deadline for all submissions is 5:00pm Eastern Daylight Time on Tuesday, August 8, 2017. There are no exceptions to this deadline.

We welcome proposals for organized panels (especially those with innovative formats), individual papers, roundtables, and workshops. Please see the complete Call for Proposals for information about preparing your submission.

When submitting a proposal online, those who have previously applied to an AAS conference might notice that things look very different this year. Over the past 5 months, the AAS has completed a search for a new proposal/abstract management system in an effort to address requests made in recent years by proposal submitters, reviewers, end users, and AAS-in-ASIA administrators for a more user-friendly and intuitive system. After trying out a number of the options available, we have selected the award-winning event management platform CadmiumCD as our new technology partner.

All users of the CadmiumCD AAS platform—session organizers, staff administrators, the Program Committee, speakers, and conference attendees—will see improvements at each step of the event-management process.

Two of the most important changes to note as you prepare a proposal for the 2018 conference:

  • First and foremost, since the CadmiumCD system saves your inputs as you go, it is now possible to leave an incomplete proposal submission and return to it later without losing any data. This is a feature that people have been requesting for years and we’re very happy that the CadmiumCD system enables us to deliver it! Also, the previous 60-minute timeout has been eliminated, so you can have an application open as long as you need to when working on it.
  • Second, the proposal submission process is now set up as a task-based checklist (shown above). We’ve broken down the components of a proposal into individual tasks; as you complete each one, a green checkmark appears on your task list. You can navigate away from an incomplete task and return to it later, but you won’t be able to submit your proposal until the entire task list is marked green.

Our main priority in selecting CadmiumCD was to provide a more user-friendly, intuitive application for submitters while also providing much-needed updated features for reviewers and the conference administrators.

There are many additional features that we’ll tell you about in time—we think you’re going to like the Itinerary Planner when next year’s conference rolls around—as well as lots that you might not see but will address the current needs of the AAS staff and help create a smoother conference experience for everyone. We are also excited to begin implementing other new features in the near future. CadmiumCD’s full event management platform will allow the AAS to grow into the system and offer many new features to AAS members and end users in the years to come. 

As always, we strongly urge that panel organizers not wait until the last minute to submit proposals! If you have any questions or encounter any difficulties in using the new system, please check out the user guide or contact the AAS secretariat for assistance (please note that office hours are 9:00am-5:00pm Eastern Time, Monday-Friday).