Anyone who publishes in conferences knows the pain of making sacrifices to meet a deadline, only to find at the last moment that it has been extended.  Year after year of these extensions and people come to expect them, making them all the more inevitable.  This reminds me of people who set their clocks fast to be late less, only to adjust themselves again to be late and have to move their clocks ever earlier.  At what point do conference deadlines lose their credibility?

I’d be interested to know how many people believe a conference’s deadline, as an effect of how often that conference extends its deadlines.  I imagine that younger researcher are more credulous, but that it’s simply because they lack the knowledge of all the extensions.

Are there data available on deadline extensions? If not, why not collect it? Each time a deadline is extended, there is surely at least one person who is frustrated.  What if there were a place they could go and vent their frustration by adding the occurrence to some listing/database?  Well here is the place:

To add your data, or vent depending on how you see it, just fill out this form:

I hope this helps. I just added AERA, which had been due today.