Over the past few months, we have received a very specific request: Can I use Converia to charge an extra fee per additional presentation for authors who wish to present more than one paper? In the following article, you will learn the background behind this surcharge and how much you might want to charge for additional presentations at your own conference.
For the majority of conferences held with Converia to date, every participant paid the same price, regardless of whether they gave no presentations, one, or several. Occasionally, organizers offered special rates specifically for authors presenting their paper(s) during the conference. In these cases, the registration fee is usually even lower than that for non-authors.
Who is your customer, and who is your supplier?
The question from our customers about surcharges for particularly prolific authors initially seemed unusual to me: Authors provide the content for the conference. Instead of granting them discounts for this, some organizers are now charging extra. At first glance, it feels as if our greengrocer were demanding money from his potato suppliers for delivering more than one sack of potatoes.
You might also be wondering who is actually the customer and who is the supplier at a conference: Are you selling exciting presentations to an audience? Or perhaps an interested audience to speakers? Of course, it is neither exclusively one nor the other. Ultimately, a conference offers a bit of everything, but above all, it provides scientific exchange. This consists of both sharing and listening in equal measure.
More presentations mean more costs – and you should cover them
What actually motivates organizers of scientific conferences to charge extra for additional presentations?
The answer is: cost control. Every single presentation entails costs for conference organizers. The most significant items are:
- Rent: Sufficient speaking time must be scheduled for every presentation. Therefore, the rent for the venue increases with every presentation.
- Printing costs: Each presentation takes up additional pages in the abstract book and conference proceedings. Consequently, typesetting and printing costs rise with every presentation.
As long as each participant limits themselves to one presentation, these costs can easily be covered by the registration fee. However, if participants give 2, 3, or more presentations, significant additional costs arise without being offset on the revenue side.
What does this mean in practice?
Let me illustrate the scale this can reach with an example. Imagine a conference with the following typical scope:
This results in the following:
What does this mean for our conference proceedings under these conditions?
To estimate the proportion of papers that were submitted as additional entries, I randomly analyzed 20 conferences. The result was that, on average, about one in five papers at a conference is not the first one submitted by its author.
Almost €7,000 in uncovered additional costs due to extra papers
What does this mean for our example? If about one-fifth of all papers at an average conference are additional submissions, then mathematically, one-quarter of our 300 authors are submitting two papers. With 300 expected authors, we would therefore have 375 submissions.
Let’s return to our room and printing costs. We now need 6 rooms instead of 5, so we would have to account for €5,000 in additional expenses. Calculated over the 75 additional papers, that is already more than €65 per paper. We had also calculated €25 per paper for printing.
Conclusion
All in all, this means you are looking at €90 in uncovered additional costs for each of the 75 extra submissions in our example, totaling €6,750. Under these conditions, you should ideally charge €90 per additional paper to cover the expected extra costs.
Since we developed an extension for Converia that can be used to calculate these additional costs, our customers have been making increasing use of it.
What has your experience been with additional costs caused by multiple submissions? Have you considered introducing such fees yourself? I look forward to your comments!
