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 about the organization of your session. You will be asked to use different tools of our online system, the Copernicus Office Meeting Organizer.

We are grateful to all conveners for their voluntary work, as EPSC would not be possible without it. However, please note that it is not possible to grant a reduced registration fee for conveners (or any EPSC committee member), as this would add an unfeasible financial burden to all EPSC participants. Depending on your status, it may be possible, however, to apply for a bursary covering registration and abstract submission fees as well as partial travel expenses (e.g., for early-career scientists or scientists from countries defined as under-represented by Europlanet) when submitting an abstract.

Please note that the programme lists the names of conveners and co-conveners for each session as well as their affiliation(s). Here, personal details such as telephone number and email are only displayed if permitted by the user. To do this, please log in to your personal data page and mark the respective public directory entries. Displaying at least your email information is strongly recommended.

Your convener duties include the following

• Define your session by title, description, and organizers;
• Choose a diverse team of conveners regarding research institute, nationality, gender, career stage, etc.;
• Advertise your session to your scientific community;
• Organize your session in terms of contributions and schedule requests;
• Invite speakers to submit an abstract reflecting the diverse scientific community
  • One oral block for the session will be assigned per ~15 accepted abstracts; Smaller sessions will be joined or they will run as posters only.
  • Note that each session should not have more than one solicited speaker and one dissertation talk per expected oral block. Solicited speakers will have longer time assigned for the talk. Solicited speakers may also be selected later from the list of authors that submitted a standard conference abstract.
• Define chairs and moderators based on mutual agreement for the different session components (oral/poster blocks; asynchronous discussion channel on Discord).
  • At least one session chair should be an early-career participant.

We expect you to encourage submissions to ensure that participation in your session is diverse and representative of the whole research community. Each session requires a minimum of two conveners to limit bias when selecting chairpersons, inviting and reviewing abstracts, and selecting contributors, including solicited speakers. You should ensure that speakers in sessions are balanced for gender, career stage, and nationality and that they are organized without disadvantage to any potential participant. You should try to ensure that there are early career participants speaking in each session. All conveners are expected to abide by the EPSC Code of Conduct.

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 once your session has been accepted and implemented in the session programme. During the whole period of session and programme organization, this tool provides you with up-to-date information and statistics about the contributions of your session. This web interface is also the starting point for the tools mentioned below.

Please access the session programme and browse to your session. You are kindly asked to log in by using you EPSC2026 dashboard link.

SOI – abstract implementation

During the abstract implementation, you are asked to review abstracts originally submitted to your session, those that are suggested to be transferred to your session, as well as abstracts without an assignment.

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

• Review abstracts originally submitted to your session ("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 via the "Upload additional abstract" option, even for a short period after the call deadline.

Please note that abstracts uploaded by conveners 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 EPSC2026 media team will select stories for the media based on submitted abstracts and will endeavour to ensure that EPSC2026 press releases are representative of the full range of research presented at the meeting and the diverse community and consider the balance of gender, career age, and nationality as far as possible. You are therefore asked to select those abstracts in your session that may be of interest to the press and media in terms of newsworthy research (results/activities that are scientifically significant, quirky or unusual, relevant to daily life, or ‘record-breaking’, e.g., fastest, biggest, longest running, furthest, or of local/national/European interest, or even support researchers from under-represented regions etc.).

After having completed the SOI task, you will have the final list of active contributions to be scheduled in your session as the outcome.

SOII – session tagging

During the session tagging, you are asked to provide the Scientific Organizing Committee (SOC) with your scheduling preferences and requested number of oral blocks. These may include day, time, and inter-session relations, session conflicts, or any other information that you consider useful.

The SOC will then schedule your session in terms of day and time. Missing information from the SOI or SOII tools will be filled by the SOC, and the authors will receive a letter of acceptance or rejection notification, respectively, by email.

SOIII – presentation selection

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

• Confirm the accepted abstracts as oral or poster presentations, according to the format requested by the authors during submission. For oral presentations, it is possible to distinguish between the following presentation types: oral, solicited talk, and dissertation talk*.
• Define the order of the talks and posters in the session program trying to schedule similar contributions all together.

Your selection will generate your draft session programme with the ordered lists of oral and poster presentations. In this draft programme, you are asked to define chairs and moderators for the different session components (oral/poster blocks; asynchronous discussion channel on Discord). Both moderators and chairpersons must accept their roles and be informed about their duties (guidelines will be posted after abstract submissions have closed) in advance.

Missing information from SOIII will be filled by the SOC, and the final meeting programme for all sessions will be uploaded. Then, all authors will receive their Letter of Schedule by email.

Daily programme

If any modifications in your session programme occur after the upload of the overall meeting programme, please forward this information directly to epsc@copernicus.org.