Not et al.

You meet 200 people a year.
You remember five.
The rest become et al.

Not et al. is a small not-for-profit project that helps researchers find each other before a conference, and remember each other after.

First pilot: Generated/-ive Futures, Umeå, 6–7 October

How it works

Now

Before the conference

Paste your ORCID iD on the event page. You see who else is coming, and a few people whose work sits close to yours. Their talks tell you where to find them.

Next

After the conference

A private record of who you met, and where. When your paths are about to cross again, at another conference, a workshop or a defence, you hear about it first.

Why we start with you

Tools like this usually fill in profiles automatically from the scholarly record. We tried that on a real programme of 36 speakers and chairs. For 17 of them, what came back was wrong or empty.

The misses were not random. They were PhD students, people who had changed institutions, people working outside academia, and people with common names. Even our founder’s ORCID iD is attached, in one of the largest open indexes of research, to an atmospheric chemist.

So nothing about you appears here unless you put it there. Your ORCID record is written by you. We read it only when you ask us to, and we use only the works you have listed on it.

Principles

  • Nothing about you appears unless you add it.
  • No ads, no tracking, no cookies. Your data is never sold.
  • Delete your entry whenever you like, and it is gone.
  • Everything is stored in the European Union.
  • Not-for-profit. Whatever it earns goes back into the work.

Who

Not et al. was started by Zekun Ling (ORCID). It is independent of any conference or organiser, and is being set up as a not-for-profit organisation.

Questions, criticism, or an event you would like to try it at: contact@notetal.com