LAB Guide to Publishing and Open Science: Scientific conferences

Conference publications cover a wide range of publications. Ministry of Education and Culture data collection takes into account the full written versions of conference presentations (full paper) and the so-called short paper/work‐in‐progress types of papers. The types of articles are defined in accordance with the conference's own practices, and the number of pages is not the only decisive factor.

The publicity of a conference publication is determined in the same way as other publications, i.e. the publication must be publicly available. A publication that is only public in the collection of a single library (e.g. the publication archive) or on the researcher's website is not considered publicly available. Also, publications distributed only to conference participants, publications that have limited online access or publications only available for a limited time (e.g. for the duration of a conference) as openly available publications are not considered publicly available. These publications can't be reported even if they have an ISSN and/or ISSN number.

Abstracts, extended abstracts, posters or PowerPoint presentations of conference papers are not considered in publishing statistics, but they can still be entered in Research.fi using the Justus reporting service.

The peer review of scientific publications refers to a procedure, in which a journal, conference, publishing house or network platform requests that experts in the field of science carry out an evaluation of the scientific integrity of manuscripts intended for publication. Publication data collection requires that peer review meets the following criteria:

• The publication evaluators have been independent, in terms of the manuscript to be evaluated. Independent evaluators refer here to accomplished researchers or other experts who are not editors of the publication series (journal or book series) or the publication (compilation, special issue of a journal, conference publication).
•  At minimum, the reliability and accuracy of research, reporting and conclusions have been evaluated in a manner characteristic of the field of science in question.
•  The evaluation has covered the entire manuscript offered for publication rather than just an abstract or extract.
•  The author has received a written referee statement of the peer review (original statement or a summary by the editorial staff/editor in chief).

In unclear cases, it must be possible to verify the peer review based on a written statement. Peer review is required for publication types A1-A4 and C1-C2.

Peer review carried out by independent experts should not be confused with editorial review, which assesses the suitability of a text, for example, for publication with other contents of a given compilation. An evaluation made by another author of the same book can only be regarded as an independent evaluation if both the author and reviewer identities are hidden from each other (double-blind).  In other cases, an open peer review is also considered sufficient. A publication whose target group is the professional or public sector (decision-making) may also be peer-reviewed.