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 tasks with regard to the organisation of your session. You will be asked to use different tools of our Copernicus Office Meeting Organizer online system. Therefore, you need a user account (user ID and password). All links and related instructions will be given by email.

Your tasks include the following:

  • Define your session by title, description, and organisers;
  • Advertise your session to your scientific community and solicit keynote presentations;
  • Rate registration fee waiver applications as an input for the support selection committees;
  • Organise your session through evaluation, acceptance, and transfer of submitted abstracts and providing scheduling requests
  • Select the presentation types (oral/solicited/poster) for each abstract;
  • Define chairpersons for the actual run of your session at the conference.

Please note the timelines for convener tasks.

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

Session modification

The session modification enables you to define or to modify the title as well as the description of your session. This tool is available until the final session programme is uploaded to the website in June. Furthermore, this tool provides you during the whole period of session and programme organisation with up-to-date information and statistics about the contributions to your session. This web interface is also the starting point for all the following tools.

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

Support application rating

Authors are able to submit their contributions together with a registration fee waiver application. You are then kindly asked to rate those applications in order to provide the support selection committees with your preferences for a grant. A short CV and statement by the author will be available to you to assist you in the assessment.

Please rate the applications (a) by the quality of science, as well as (b) by the quality of the abstract. In order to justify your decision, you are invited to add a comment to each rated application. Conveners are not allowed to rate or even comment on support applications in which they are involved as a co-author. These applications must be handled either by another session convener or even directly by the Programme and Science Committee (PSC) chair.

The support selection committee will take your rating and your comments into account in the final selection.

All applicants will be informed about the final decision of the selection committee. Independent of a positive or negative decision, authors are requested to confirm their participation in the meeting by the given deadline. Abstracts without a participation confirmation will be withdrawn automatically.

SOI – Abstract implementation

During the abstract implementation phase, you are asked to review abstracts originally submitted to your session, abstracts 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 three different actions available below.

  • Review abstracts originally submitted to your session ("Review of submitted abstracts to your session");
  • Review abstracts that were suggested for transfer to your session by another convener ("Review of transferred abstracts to your session");
  • Review abstracts without any session assignment ("Review of unassigned abstracts to your session").

In addition, you may upload contributions that were directly sent to you. Please note that abstracts uploaded by convenors 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".

The outcome of this tool is the final list of active contributions to be scheduled in your session. The authors will then receive a letter of acceptance/rejection by email.

SOII – Session tagging

During the session tagging phase, you are asked to provide the PSC with your scheduling requests. These may include inter-session relations, requests for a specific lecture room size, or any other information that you consider to be useful. Please note that the allocation of oral units will be done by the PSC upon scheduling, and will in general be proportional to the number of abstracts received for a session. Should you want to draw the attention of the PSC to special requests please use the "Optional information"-box.

For the EMS2020, SOI and SOII tools are scheduled to be available for the same time period in parallel (see Timelines). However, SOI has to be completed first for SOII to become available.

The PSC will take into account as much as possible your scheduling requests when deciding on the session programme. However, given many competing requests from convenors, there is no guarantee these can all be accommodated.

The PSC will schedule your session in terms of day, room, and time. Missing information from the SOI tool will be completed by the PSC to the best of its knowledge.

SOIII – Presentation selection

Following the assignment of session times by the PSC, you are then asked to

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

Please note that at least one of the oral time slots should be reserved for poster pitches, providing the opportunity for poster presenters to briefly introduce their posters to the audience. The length of oral presentation slots is 15 minutes for all sessions; solicited presentations can be assigned as 15-min or 30-min presentations.

Initially, you will find that a poster pitch of 15 minutes is already assigned in your oral programme: This can be moved to best fit your programme, and also extended to multiples of 15 minutes, dependent on the number of poster presentations you assign.

Your selections will generate your draft session programme. In this draft programme, you are asked to identify chairperson(s) for each subdivision of your session.

Missing information from SOIII will be completed 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, indicating the time, location, and type of their presentation.

Mail tool

Through the mail tool you have the option to contact all (contact) authors or only all contact authors of poster/oral presentations in your session, for example to make them aware of the poster pitches or give other guidance how you intend to run the session. You are also able to write to the contact person or all authors for a specific abstract, for example to inquire whether the presenter would be prepared to switch the presentation from poster to oral. This function is available via a small envelope icon below the abstract number.

Daily programme

If any modifications in your session programme occur after the upload of the overall meeting programme, please forward this information directly to ems2020@copernicus.org. These changes will be included in the daily programme that will be displayed on-site in front of each lecture room.

Session chairing

Since it is the task of convener(s) to act as chairperson(s) and/or nominate speakers/authors to chair a particular sub-session of a scientific session, you should ensure that chairing of sessions should induce interactive, interesting, and productive sessions. Beyond keeping to the published time schedule, it is important to facilitate and raise discussions. Chairperson guidelines will be provided in due time.

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