Guidelines for Conveners

General Information

In order to help especially new conveners, please find below a list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ).

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 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 convener and co-coveners for each session as well as their affiliation. Thereby, personal details such as telephone number and e-mail are only given if you allow the display. To do this, please log in to your Personal Data and mark the respective "Public Directory Entries". The programme committee strongly recommends that as a minimum, you display your e-mail information.

Your convener 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 committee;
• 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;
• Define poster judges for the Outstanding Student Poster (OSP) contest.

The following tools 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, and enables the convener to modify the ordering of the co-conveners. 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 Assignment & Ranking

During an initial period of the abstract submission, authors are able to submit their contributions together with a support application. You are then kindly asked to rank those applications in order to provide the support selection committee with your preferences for a granting. In addition, you are also able to assign support applications to unassigned abstracts and you can upload additional contributions. Please note that applications without a Convener ranking and/or without a payment can not be considered.

Please rank solely on the scientific importance of the contribution to your session because of limited funds. The support selection committee 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 committee. 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.

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 late contributions which were directly sent to you. The outcome of this tool is the final list of active contributions to be scheduled in your session.

Please note that abstracts submitted to EGU2013 need to pay an Abstract Processing Charge (APC) of €40. This means that also late contributions uploaded by you need to have a payment, either by the authors’ credit card (they give you the details), or you as a convener may choose to pay the APC on behalf of the author yourself, using your own credit card. Regarding the latter, conveners cannot be reimbursed by the EGU. Thank you very much for your understanding!

SOII – Session Tagging

During the session tagging, you are asked to provide the programme committee 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. Furthermore, you are able to ask for a Poster Summaries Discussion (PSD) session of 45 minutes related to your session. PSDs are dedicated to the oral summary of poster papers (1-2 slides each) and are not meant to extend the oral session.

The programme committee 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 programme committee and the authors will receive a Letter of Acceptance/Rejection by email.

SOIII – Presentation Selection

Following the time as given by the scheduling of the programme committee, 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;
• For each oral block, as a guideline, include at least two young scientist abstracts marked by "ys";
• Define at least two chairpersons for every oral and poster time block.

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 programme committee 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.

Information on Solicited Abstracts

Solicited submissions are those abstracts (which might be ultimately oral or poster) that you would like to particularly highlight in your session. Please note the following:

• You should indicate the names of solicited people in the description of your session (Solicited people: Eugene G. Underwood, EugeneG@Under.com; Janice E. Smith, janice@smith.com). This can be realized by using the tool Session Modification.
• You will give the status of 'solicited' when you compile your final programme (see SOIII), and may give either solicited 30 or 15 minutes of times in an oral block, or a solicited poster presentation in a poster block.
• You should aim for no more than one solicited oral presentation per oral block. The ultimate number of abstracts that conveners receive will determine the number of oral blocks they receive by their programme group chair. Thus, it is sometimes difficult to tell 'how many' abstract submissions to solicit. Use your best judgement, but be aware, that if you invite too many solicited abstracts, you might not be able to put them all in your oral blocks. Programme group chairs will make a decision whether an exception might be made to having greater than one solicited oral presentation per oral block, with the Scientific Programme Committee Chair mediating in any exceptional cases.
• First Author Rule: Please be aware of the first author rule for oral preference submissions.
• Solicited abstracts do not receive discounted Abstract Processing Charges, registration fees, or travel reimbursement.

Daily Programme

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

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Q: Can session proposals be submitted after submission deadline?

A: The deadline must be met. In the past we had some flexibility in this respect, but with the overall EGU programme becoming increasingly larger, this will probably be more and more difficult in the future.

Q: What are the differences and advantages of co-sponsoring and co-organising sessions?

A: Co-sponsored sessions are listed in the respective programmes of the respective co-sponsoring Programme Groups and can thus be found by more participants. Co-organized sessions receive a combined session number, consisting of shortcuts for all the co-organizing divisions (e.g. HS10.5/BG2.21). These sessions are listed in places in the programme that correspond to their respective numbers in each subdivision. Co-organization generally implies that the session has been discussed with the respective Programme Group Chair and a closer coordination between Programme Groups compared to co-sponsored sessions. Note that the Programme Group listed first is the leading Programme Group, i.e. all the abstracts of the session are credited to this Programme Group, rooms are assigned by the Chair of the first-listed Programme Group and authors may take part only in the outstanding student poster competition of this Programme Group.

Q: What do we have to do about requests to co-organize and co-list sessions during the skeleton programme preparation?

A: Nothing. The Programme Group Chair is responsible for these tasks.

Q: Can convener listings still be changed after the session was accepted in the session programme?

A: Yes, conveners can do changes in the convener listings (including add new co-conveners) at all times. This can be done in the "Session Modification" tool which conveners can access by the link "Convener Login".

Q: Can abstracts still be submitted, even after submission deadline?

A: Authors should be encouraged to submit their abstract with the official submission deadline. However, conveners can still upload late abstracts by the "SOI – Abstract Implementation" tool. It is not possible to upload late abstracts after the SOI deadline. The arising Abstract Processing Charges of such a late abstract can either be paid directly by the convener (by credit card) or the convener may request the author to pay the Abstract Processing Charges. In latter case, a pdf invoice is sent to the author by email.

Q: How to merge sessions?

A: After informing the authors and giving them some time to request a move to a different session follow this procedure:

1. Discuss between all conveners which session is going to be used as the base for the new session.
2. Update the title, abstract and list of conveners of the base session.
3. Mark all abstracts in the other session for movement into the new session.
4. Accept all those abstracts in the new session. The result is that the "base session" for the merge now contains the abstracts of both sessions, while the other session contains no abstracts and can be withdrawn, i.e. removed, in the next stage.

Q: When two sessions are merged, does this mean that one session has to drop its title and description?

A: It is recommended that the convener list, session title and description should be adapted (in the Session Modification tool) in case of a session merge. This is to guarantee the best representation of the ideas, topics and targeted communities.

Q: What does session tagging mean?

A: Session tagging means that the conveners check the provisional programme and look at the other sessions. They can request no-overlaps, back-to-back scheduling, and preferred days. Conveners also have to estimate the number of people in the audience. Moreover, PSD sessions can be requested in the SOII – Session Tagging tool.

Q: What are PSD (Poster Summaries & Discussions)?

A: These are time slots in dedicated side-rooms to have presentations/discussions of poster sessions with the authors and the public. Conveners may request a PSD room in their Session Organizing Tool SOII – Session Tagging. These meetings are announced in the programme separately and receive their own PSD-numbers.

Q: How do we schedule sessions?

A: This is the task of the respective Programme Group Chair(s).