What are academic events?
Academic events are central forums for exchange in research and teaching. Researchers, experts and students meet here to present, discuss and further develop current topics. They offer space for informal exchange and networking, enable early feedback independent of publication cycles and provide insight into new fields of research.
The formats include conferences, workshops, symposia, colloquia and seminars. The participation of scientific institutions in their implementation is essential for the categorization of an event as scientific. 
There are numerous - mainly discipline-specific - platforms and services through which scientific events are announced and documented. To date, however, there has been no central, permanent point of contact for reliably finding information about scientific events - past and future. Information often disappears from websites some time after an event has ended.

How can scientific events be permanently referenced?

The ConfIDent platform creates a reliable infrastructure for the long-term provision and curation of information on scientific events across disciplinary boundaries. The aim is to provide high-quality, collaboratively maintained metadata - semantically structured and in line with the FAIR principles: findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable.
The underlying metadata schema was developed in consultation with DataCite and is based on the work of the international PIDs for Conferences & Projects initiative by Crossref and DataCite.
ConfIDent enables targeted searches for scientific events and offers permanent, citable information - including the allocation of free DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers). Obviously untrustworthy (predatory) conferences are consistently excluded.

IN May 2025 we discussed the current status, the needs and challenges for PIDs for academic events in our workshop in Hanover.