Guidelines for conveners

General information

Conveners and co-conveners are permanently assisted by the staff of Copernicus Meetings. We will inform you about any deadlines and milestones with regard to the organization of your session. You will be asked to use different tools of our online system Copernicus Office Meeting Organizer. For this purpose, you have already received a user account (ID and password) during the set-up of the session programme. All links and related instructions will be given by email.

Please note that the programme lists the names of conveners and co-conveners for each session as well as their affiliation(s). Here, personal details such as telephone number and email are only displayed if permitted by the user. To do this, please log in to your personal data and mark the respective public directory entries. Displaying at least your email information is strongly recommended.

Your convener duties include the following:

Define your session by title, description, and organizers;
Advertise your session to your scientific community;
Organize your session in terms of contributions and schedule requests;
Invite speakers reflecting the diverse scientific community (note that each session should not have more than two invited speakers);
Define moderators for the asynchronous discussion channel on Slack associated with your session at the conference;
Check the final uploaded contributions: the length of oral talks should be limited to 10 minutes (maximum) and posters should be readable on a screen (following the oral and poster guidelines). Authors that have uploaded a video presentation or poster will be able to promote it through a one-minute-one-slide pitch during the live session. The single slide should be legible and to the point. It will also be possible to upload a pre-recorded one-minute video for the pitch.

We expect you to encourage submissions to ensure that participation in your session is diverse and representative of the whole research community. Each session requires a minimum of two conveners to limit bias when selecting chairpersons, inviting and reviewing abstracts and selecting contributors, including invited speakers. You should ensure sessions balance gender, career age, nationality and are organized without disadvantage to any potential participant. You should try to ensure that there are early career professionals speaking in each session. All conveners are expected to abide by the EPSC Code of Conduct.

The Copernicus Office Meeting Organizer provides the following tools to assist you in the fulfilment of your duties:

Session modification

The session modification enables you to define or to modify the title as well as the description of your session. Furthermore, this tool provides you during the whole period of session and programme organization with up-to-date information and statistics about the contributions of your session. This web interface is also the starting point for the tools mentioned below.

Please access the session programme and browse to your session. You are kindly asked to log in by using the Convener login link.

SOI – abstract implementation

During the abstract implementation, you are asked to review abstracts originally submitted to your session, those which are suggested to be transferred to your session, as well as abstracts without an assignment.

You are kindly asked to process the four different actions available below:

Review abstracts originally submitted to your session ("Review of submitted abstracts");
Review contributions that were suggested for transfer to your session by another convener ("Review of transferred abstracts");
Review abstracts without any session assignment ("Review of unassigned abstracts");
Confirm the accepted abstracts as oral or poster presentations , according to the format requested by the authors during submission. (Please note: the asynchronous nature of the pre-recorded video presentations means that there is no limitation on the number of oral presentations in a session, thus there is no requirement for conveners to make a selection of oral or poster presentations).

In addition, you may upload contributions that were directly sent to you via the "Upload additional abstract" option.

Please note, that abstracts uploaded by conveners are listed under "Implementation Summary and Finalization".

All these actions can be modified as long as the "Implementation Summary and Finalization" action has not been completed. After having completed the reviews and uploads, please check the implementation summary and then finalize the abstract implementation. You are also asked to select those abstracts in your session which may be of interest for the press & media in terms of newsworthy research (results/activities that are scientifically significant, quirky or unusual, relevant to daily life, or ‘record-breaking’ e.g. fastest, biggest, longest running, furthest, or of local/national/European interest, etc.). This will help the EPSC2021 media team in their selection of stories for the media, and ensure that EPSC2021 press releases are representative of the full range of research presented at the meeting and the diverse community, balancing gender, career age and nationality.

After having completed the SOI task, you will have the final list of active contributions to be scheduled in your session as the outcome.

SOII – session tagging

During the session tagging, you are asked to provide the Scientific Organizing Committee (SOC) with your scheduling preferences for your oral session block (a 45-minute session with a short summary by the conveners, followed by short pitches by the authors and live Q&A). These may include day, time and inter-session relations, session conflicts, or any other information that you consider as useful.

The SOC will then schedule your session in terms of day and time. Missing information from the SOI or SOII tools will be filled by the SOC and the authors will receive a letter of acceptance or rejection notification, respectively, by email.

SOIII – presentation selection

Following the time as given by the scheduling of the SOC, you are then asked to:

Define the ordering of the talks and posters.

Your selection will generate your draft session programme with the ordered lists of oral and poster presentations. In this draft programme, you are asked to define moderators for the asynchronous discussion forum associated with your session and a chairperson for the live session discussion. Both moderators and chairpersons must accept their roles and be informed about their duties (guidelines will be posted after abstract submissions have closed).

Missing information from SOIII will be filled by the SOC and the final meeting programme for all sessions will be uploaded. Then, all authors will receive their Letter of Schedule by email.

Daily programme

If any modifications in your session programme occur after the upload of the overall meeting programme, please forward this information directly to epsc2021@copernicus.org.

Chair and moderator guidelines

Please ensure that the chairpersons and moderators of your session are informed about their roles and responsibilities according to the Chairpersons and moderators guidelines.