Invitations do two jobs at once: they tell people the call is open, and — when the call is invite only — they are what makes those people eligible to submit at all.
The contact book
Invitations are sent to contacts — people your organization emails who are not necessarily Rostrum users. The contact book lives at organization level, so a society's membership list is built once and reused for every call it runs.
Contacts can be organized into named lists (past presenters, members, a specialist interest group) and imported from a spreadsheet. When you compose an invitation you pick one or more lists, paste additional addresses directly, or both.
What the recipient gets
An email with a personal link. What happens when they click it depends on who they are:
- Most people are signed straight in — one click, no password, no code — and land in the participant hub ready to start a draft.
- Anyone who already holds management rights over that event is instead asked for an emailed code. This is deliberate: a one-click link in an inbox should never be able to open a staff account.
The link works repeatedly until the submission window closes, so a recipient can come back to it. Every send is tracked — you can see who was invited, when it was last sent, whether it was opened, and whether it was accepted.
Managing the invitation list
From the invitations panel you can resend to individuals, add late invitees at any time, and revoke an invitation — which immediately stops that address from submitting on an invite-only call.
The other route in — a public link
Invitations are how a closed call works. An open call has a second route: a public submission link you generate on the Abstracts settings screen and put wherever you like — a society newsletter, a conference website, social media.
The link leads to a landing page showing the event name, whether submissions are open, the formats you accept, and the sections an abstract will need. There is a single button, and it does not ask anyone to register: the visitor enters an email address, receives a six-digit code, and lands in the hub ready to draft.
The address itself is a long random token rather than anything guessable, so the page cannot be found by trying event names.
- Generating the link also switches the call to open submissions and saves that immediately — which is the point, but it means the act of generating a link changes who may submit. Rostrum tells you this before you click.
- Regenerating or disabling kills every copy already shared, instantly and without a confirmation step. If the link is in a printed newsletter, treat regeneration as a last resort.
- Switching the call back to invitation only makes the link go dark but does not delete it. Switch back to open and the same address works again.
When the submission window closes the link keeps working, but the page says submissions are closed and the button disappears — which is usually better than a dead link for anyone arriving late.
Unsubscribes
Every invitation and deadline reminder carries an unsubscribe link. Unsubscribing suppresses that address from all bulk mail from your organization, on every list and every event. It is honored immediately and mid-campaign.
Unsubscribing (above) is an organization-wide suppression of bulk mail, chosen by the recipient from an email. Separately, a signed-in user can switch off categories of reminder in their own profile — upload reminders, review reminders, abstract reminders, poster questions, announcements.
Neither of them affects transactional mail. Submission receipts, decision letters, review assignments and sign-in codes are always delivered, because they are the operation of the event rather than marketing.