Guidelines for Programme Committee

Detailed Instructions

Preparation of the "Call-for-Programme" Programme
Preparation of the "Call-for-Papers" Programme
Overviews for Programme Committee Members
Organizing the Meeting Programme
Daily Programme
Oral vs. Poster Statistics

General

Programme Committee members will be assisted by the staff members of the EGU office and by the open, Internet-based Copernicus administration, service and information system (COSIS). Organization of each programme will take place primarily on-line using COSIS. Parts of this web-based system are open only to meeting organizers who must log in using a COSIS ID-Nr. and a password. The EGU office will provide the ID-Nr. under which each Programme Committee member is registered and a provisional password which the Programme Committee member may change afterwards. The Programme Committee member has the sole responsibility for ensuring that his/her address and phone, fax and email numbers are correctly entered into the COSIS system, and appropriate changes can be made online at any time.

Please, remember the URL addresses of the assembly home site and of COSIS and your COSIS login data:

EGU 2005 home site: http://meetings.copernicus.org/egu2005
COSIS: www.cosis.net
My COSIS ID-Nr.:                                      Password:
egu@copernicus.org

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COSIS Tools (overview of how to find and organize your assembly session on the web)

On this assembly home site, you will find the link "Programme" with the sublinks "Call-for-Programme" and "Call-for-Papers", which brings you to the overview of the programme areas for the assembly. Click the link of your choice to find the list of programmes for any given area.

On the top of the list of sessions you will find those links that are reserved for the Programme Committee members:

For the "Call-for-Programme" programme the link "Call-for-Papers Programme Organization" which allows you to prepare your "Call-for-Paper" programme from the "Call-for-Programme" programme.

For the "Call-for-Papers" programme the links "Overall Sessions' Overview", "Meeting Programme Organization".

The first link will provide an overview on the status of the contributions received for each session of your programme before and after the corresponding conveners have prepared their sessions (see below), while the second link will provide various tools to finalize your meeting programme in view of the overall conditions of the assembly time table.

For the "Meeting Programme" various links will be included to study the time tables for the sessions of your programme as well as for the sessions of all parts of the assembly programme: View Oral Time Table, View Poster Time Table, View Overall Oral Time Table, View Overall Poster Time Table.

If you then scroll down to a session you will find its number and title as well as the names of its conveners. The first string of links is for the public and the second one is exclusively reserved for the session organizers and Programme Committee members (COSIS login required). Below is an example of what you will see on the screen:

The link "Organizer Session Form" allows the conveners to upload online any information or modifications regarding the title of the session, the session description, the scientific organizing committee, and the list of solicited speakers; all this information will be included online in the link "Information" of the public string. Moreover, the link also allows uploading online information about any "Publication" foreseen for the session and later on the "Report" of the convener about the session.

Any additions and/or modifications regarding the organizers of a session should be reported directly to the EGU office, egu@copernicus.org, since only the COSIS administrator can make appropriate changes. The information is included in the link "Organizer" of the public string. The actual addresses of the organizers, however, are uploaded directly from their own private COSIS home sites. Therefore, the organizers have the sole responsibility for ensuring that their addresses are correct.

Under the link "Support Ranking" all contributions submitted to a session by authors asking for support will be listed in the order of receipt by author(s), with title and abstract number. If you click the abstract number you will find the corresponding abstract as PDF file. The tool will then allow the convener to rank these contributions in view of their importance to the session. Any ranking will be forwarded automatically to the Support Selection Committee for final selection.

Under the link "Contributions" all contributions submitted to the session will be listed in the order of receipt by author(s), with title and abstract number. If you click the abstract number you will find the corresponding abstract as a PDF file. Once a paper has been accepted by the convener and the Programme Committee it will be uploaded in journal style and accessible for the public under "Accepted Contributions".

The tool "Session Organization" will enable the conveners to organize their session according to the contributions received and to provide important input regarding the session for the Programme Committee. Once the Programme Committee has finalized the overall schedule of the assembly, the conveners will need to finalize the oral and poster programmes of their sessions.

Finally, after the conveners have finalized their session COSIS will automatically compile the "Oral Draft Programme" and the "Poster Draft Programme" for final inspection by the conveners and co-conveners as well as by the respective Programme Committee members. The programme will then be uploaded for the public under "Oral Programme" and "Poster Programme", respectively.

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Preparation of the "Call-for-Programme" Programme

(Programme committee members and Division/Section officers should complete their input for the "Call-for-Programme" by 31 May 2004)

Based on the "Call-for-Programme Draft Programme" or the "Skeleton Programme", respectively, the scientific community is invited in an open "Call-for-Programme" to suggest online additional titles and/or conveners and co-conveners of timely and attractive sessions. Thereby, the "Skeleton Programme" is usually the result of the input obtained from the meeting programme of the previous years' assemblies and/or the last Division/Section business meetings and/or questionnaires distributed to authors and conveners of the last assembly by the corresponding Division/Section presidents and/or secretaries.

The "Skeleton Programme" must be forwarded to the EGU office for inclusion on the web by the above deadline.

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Preparation of the "Call-for-Papers" Programme

(Programme Committee members should complete their part of the "Call-for-Papers" programme by 30 September 2004)

After the deadline for the "Call-for-Programme" the "Call-for-Papers Programme Organization" tool will become accessible for the Programme Committee members. This tool will enable you to add session titles and/or conveners to already existing sessions, to accept or to reject or to combine sessions originally included in the "Skeleton Programme" and/or suggested by the community as well as to transfer sessions to other parts of the assembly programme. In order to avoid duplications of sessions and clashes and overlaps between different sessions in the assembly programme, it is of great importance that the Programme Committee members of all programme parts are working together. This cooperation is coordinated by the Programme Committee chair, who has the final decision.

Once the "Call-for-Papers" programme has been finalized in this way, the EGU office will inform the conveners and co-conveners, including also those that have not been finally selected, and invite them to complete their "Organizer Session Forms"; moreover, the EGU office will inform all those colleagues about the final status of the programme that have actively participated in the "Call-for-Programme". The "Call-for-Papers" programme is then advertised to the scientific community worldwide.

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Overviews for Programme Committee Members

(Period 01 October 2004 – 04 February 2005)

For each session of your programme you may monitor the receipt of abstracts associated with a support application under the link "Support Selection" and without such an application under the link "Contributions".

After the deadline for support applications you may monitor the ranking of these applications by the corresponding conveners and the result of the final selection by the Support Selection Committee under the link "Support Selection".

The Programme Committee members' link "Overall Sessions' Overview" will provide a matrix for the sessions of your programme containing in the first section the numbers of contributions received and the number of contributions selected as "No Preference" and "Poster" by their authors, respectively. These numbers are continuously updated during the processes of receipt of abstracts, outcome of the support selection and the reaction of the corresponding applicants, and the first part of the organization of the sessions by their respective conveners (acceptance - rejection, transfer and conveners' upload of contributions).

The second section includes the results of the second part of the session organization by the corresponding conveners (oral vs. poster selection), i. e., the number of oral papers, poster papers and oral units as well as the max. number of oral units allowed for a particular session.

The third part indicates those sessions not finalized by their respective conveners and the special requirements forwarded by the session conveners.

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Organizing the Meeting Programme

(Programme Committee members should complete their part of the "Meeting Programme Organization" during 07 – 10 February 2005 and attend the PC meeting during 11 – 13 February 2005)

For details concerning the oral vs. poster statistics in general and for the various sessions, please notice the chapter at the bottom of this page.

After the conveners have finalized the second part of their session organization the "Meeting Programme Organization" tool will become accessible for the Programme Committee members. This tool will enable you to finalize those sessions, which have not been finalized by their conveners, to combine smaller sessions to larger ones and to change their titles and/or conveners and/or co-conveners and/or to modify the requirements of the conveners adequately as well as the allocation of oral units for each session.

Based on this input you or COSIS will be able to draft a first programme for the oral parts of your sessions.

At the Programme Committee meeting these programmes will be optimized in view of the total amount of time allocated for oral presentations as well as space allocated for the poster presentations, in view of overlaps and potential duplications and in view of the "Union Symposia" and "Medal and Key Note Lecture" programmes. As part of this overall schedule the conveners may be asked to re-arrange their oral vs. poster relationship correspondingly.

Once the "Session Draft Programmes" are accepted, they are uploaded as "Meeting Programmes" for the public and all authors are informed accordingly about the schedule of their presentations, respectively.

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Daily Programme

(please forward any changes to EGU office by 08 April 2005)

Changes in the "Session Programme" which occur after the deadline for printing of the programme book may still be included in the "Daily Programmes" distributed at the conference site. Modifications to session programmes which occur after 08 April 2004 and during the assembly should be reported directly to the session chair so that the "Daily Programmes" posted on session doors are as accurate as possible.

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Important Remarks

1. All contributions included in the final "Meeting Programme" will be included in the CD-Rom version of the abstract book Geophysical Research Abstracts.
2. Once the final "Meeting Programme" is uploaded onto the web, the programme book and the abstract CD-Rom will be generated and therefore no changes in the programmes will be accepted anymore!
3. Once a session has been scheduled it must take place. Conveners have no right to cancel a session.

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Oral vs. Poster Statistics

Allocation

In the Austria Center Vienna (ACV) there are reserved for

Oral Presentations

Blue Level (Basement): Rooms 1 (200 seats), 2 (200), 3 (90), 4 (200) and 5 (200)
Yellow Level (Ground Floor): Rooms 6 (500), 7 (500), 8 (110), 9 (200), 10 (500) and 11 (120)
Green Level (1st Floor) : Rooms 12 (140), 13 (100), 14 (100), 15 (80), 16 (100), 17 (100), 18 (140) and 19 (120)
Red Level (2nd Floor): Rooms 20 (650), 21 (120), 22 (120), 23 (120), 24 (120) and 25 (650)
Extra Halls: Basement D (1400) and 2nd Floor A (3000)

Poster Presentations

Blue Level (Basement): Halls Y (3200 sqm) and X (3200 sqm)
Yellow Level (Ground Floor): Hall Z (2600 sqm)

Technical Conditions

All lecture rooms are equipped with one overhead and one PC/video projector and a laptop station.
Poster panels are landscape with the dimensions 197 cm (width) x 100 cm (height) and a small table for a laptop presentation.

Time Schedule

For the oral and poster presentations the council has decided on the following time schedule:

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Time Allocations

Boundary Conditions

The Council has decided that a normal contributed oral presentation should last 15 min incl. discussions and change over (= 1 oral unit), and that a solicited (invited) paper may last 30 min (= 2 oral units) and a special lecture max. 45 min (= 3 oral units).

Furthermore the Council decided that separate oral sessions should always be scheduled in multiples of one oral time block, i.e. N x 1.5 hours = N x 6 oral units, with N = 0, 1, 2, 3 and 4 and N > 4 being excluded.

Oral Units

The number of min. total oral units is: 3.000

(4 time blocks) x (6 oral units each) x (25 lecture rooms) x (5 days) = 3.000

Overall Ratios

At the submission of an abstract the author or the convener was able to select the status of the presentation: “No Preference” or “Poster”. Thereby “Poster” is automatically granted poster, while “No Preference” is granted “oral” only by the convener and by the final number of oral units available for a particular session.

After the conveners had finalized their Part 1 activities, we received:

No Preference papers = 7466
Poster papers = 2818
Total = 10307

This leads to the following disbalance:

Allocation of Oral Units per Session

Since only “No Preference” papers can be scheduled as “orals” by the corresponding convener, the “Grand Oral Units’ Ratio” is determined from the total number of oral units available and the total number of “No Preference” papers received, as

GR = 3.000 ÷ 7466 = 0.402

The preliminary number of oral units (NOU*) for a given session is then determined by:NOU* = Int [(# No Preference papers of the session) x GR]

And the number of time blocks (NTB) for that session

NTB = Int [(NOU* ÷ 6) + RF]

where RF is the “rounding-off factor”. Playing around with different values for RF we found that the total sum of all NTBs becomes closest to the actual number of time blocks available, namely 500, for RF = 0.5. Please, click here to find the table of all the numbers introduced above in relation to the sessions of the EGU 2005 General Assembly.

The final number of oral units (as multiples of 6) for a session is then determined by:

NOU = NTB x 6

These numbers have been provided to the conveners for arranging their oral vs. poster sessions in Part 2 of their session overviews. For option 1 sessions these numbers are fixed. For option 2 sessions, however, additional oral time blocks and therefore oral units can be added. This, however, shall be the responsibility of the corresponding PC members. Because of this reason the conveners were asked to add oral contributions of their preference (oral 2).

Remark 1: Certainly, the above method for determining the number of oral units for a session depends on the number of “No Preference” papers submitted to that session: the more “No Preference” papers, the more oral units. This may be unfair to these sessions for which their conveners have successfully recruited posters.

Remark 2: The decision that oral sessions must fill full time blocks (multiples of 6!) has turned out to treat larger session in a rather unfair way: a session with 8 “No Preference” papers and a session with 22 “No Preference” papers get one time block. The reason being that with RF = 0.5 we have 6 +/- 3 scheduled oral units for a time block and this projected into the world of submission with 1/GR to 8–22 submitted “No Preference” papers. Thus, the “unfairness” scales roughly with 1/GR or (# No Preference papers received) / (# oral units made available by the organizer).

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