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. Therefore, you need a user account (user ID and password). All links and related instructions will be given by email.

Your duties include:

  • Define your session by title, description, and organizers;
  • Advertise your session to your scientific community;
  • Rank financial support applications as an input for the support selection committees;
  • Organize your session in terms of contributions and schedule requests;
  • Select the presentation types of the different abstracts;
  • Define chair persons for the actual run of your session at the conference;
  • Provide a summary of the session for online publication.

The Copernicus Office Meeting Organizer provides the following tools to assist you in the fulfillment 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 following tools.

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

Support Application Ranking

During an initial period of the abstract submission, authors are able to submit their contributions together with an Award or Registration Fee Waiver application. You are then kindly asked to rank those applications in order to provide the support selection committees with your preferences for a granting.

Please rank solely on the scientific importance of the contribution to your session because of limited funds. The support selection committees will then consider your ranking and other priorities factored in, e.g., applicants ranked by more than one convener and the fact that certain applicants may obtain national grants if offered a waiver and/or a small support. The above restrictions/priorities will mean that few, perhaps even no applicants from certain sessions are supported. Furthermore, supported participants in some sessions may not be those most highly ranked on scientific grounds by any given convener, particularly if the applicant was accorded high priority by another convener.

All applicants will be informed about the final decision of the selection committees. Independent from a positive or negative decision, the authors are requested to notify their participation in the meeting until a given deadline. Abstracts without a participation notification will be withdrawn automatically.

Please note that in case of a convener team only ONE ranking can be given. Thus you have either to agree within the team on the ranking, or assign one member of your team to rank the applications.

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. In addition, you may upload contributions which were directly sent to you.

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

  • Review abstract originally submitted to your session AM1 ("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").

In addition, you may upload contributions that were directly sent to you. Here you have the option either to upload a complete abstract ("Upload additional abstract") or the submittal information only, i.e. author and title ("Upload abstract information"). After upload you also have the option to

  • Review the uploaded abstract(s) ("Review of additional abstracts").

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 upload, please check the implementation summary and then finalize the Abstract Implementation.

The outcome of this tool is the final list of active contributions to be scheduled in your session.

SOII – Session Tagging

During the session tagging, you are asked to provide the Programme and Science Committee (PSC) with your scheduling requests. These may include time and inter-session relations, requests for a specific lecture room size, or any other information that you consider as useful.

The PSC will then schedule your session in terms of day, room and time. Missing information from the SOI or SOII tools will be filled by the PSC and the authors will receive a Letter of Acceptance/Rejection by email.

For the 10th EMS / 8th ECAC, SOI and SOII tools will be available in parallel, i.e. 10 – 20 May 2010 (see also Important Deadlines). However, you are asked to complete any transfer of abstracts (SOI) by 15 May 2010.

SOIII – Presentation Selection

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

  • Subdivide the abstracts into oral and poster presentations;
  • Define the ordering of the talks and posters;
  • Define the length of each talk.

Your selections will generate your draft session programme with the subdivision into the different times for the presentations. In this draft programme, you are asked to define a chair person for your session.

Missing information from SOIII will be filled by the PSC and the final meeting programme for all sessions will be uploaded. Then, all authors will receive their Letter of Schedule by email, mentioning the actual time and location of their presentation.

Daily Programme

If any modifications in your session programme occur after the upload of the overall meeting programme, please forward this information directly to meetings@copernicus.org . These changes will be included in the Daily Programme that will be displayed on-site in front of each lecture room.