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 the following:

  • Define your session by title, description, and organizers;
  • Advertise your session to your scientific community;
  • Rate 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.

Please note the "Timelines" for convenor tasks.

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 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

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 rate those applications in order to provide the support selection committees with your preferences for a grant.

Please rate the applications (a) by the quality of science, as well as (b) by the quality of the abstract. In order to emphasise your decision, you can 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 group chair.

Your programme group chair will then provide a ranking of all ratings within his/her programme group to the support selection committee.

The support selection committee will consider this ranking together with your rating.

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, 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 three different actions available below:

  • Review abstracts originally submitted to your session ("Review of submitted abstracts to your session");
  • Review contributions 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. 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"). 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.

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 to be 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 16th EMS / 11th ECAC, SOI and SOII tools will be available in parallel (see Timelines).

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 chairperson for your session.

Missing information from SOIII will be filled in 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 ems2016@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

It is also 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. Chairing of sessions should ensure interactive, interesting and productive sessions. Beyond keeping to the published time schedule, it is important to facilitate discussions.