Thank you for considering organizing a session at the EMS Annual Meeting 2023. Here we provide information to support you at each step of the organization, from proposing a session to finally chairing the session at the conference.

Convener teams are permanently assisted by the staff of Copernicus Meetings. We will inform you about any deadlines and tasks with regard to the organization of your session. You will be asked to use different tools of our Copernicus Office Meeting Organizer online system. Therefore, you will need a user account (user ID and password). All links and related instructions will be given by email.

General

When proposing a new session for the EMS Annual Meeting, the following steps and tasks between December 2022 and September 2023 will be required to organize a successful session:

  • Defining a session title, scope, and convener team: we encourage you to build diverse convener teams, considering different genders, career stages, and countries or institutes.
  • Advertising your session to your scientific community and invite presentations.
  • Organizing your session through a) evaluation, acceptance, and transfer of submitted abstracts and providing scheduling preferences and b) assigning the presentation type for each abstract.
  • Identifying chairpersons who run the onsite oral and poster sessions at the conference; please note that the EMS requests the conveners who chair the session to be physically present at the venue in Bratislava; conveners need to register for the Annual Meeting, no registration waivers are provided.
  • Curating a dynamic live session by getting acquainted with presentation material uploaded to the programme page prior to the session.

The Copernicus Office Meeting Organizer provides the tools listed below to assist you in your tasks.

Please note, that we expect that those volunteering as conveners are normally planning to attend the EMS Annual Meeting; at least two of the conveners need to attend the event onsite in Bratislava.

Timeline for convener tasks

Session submission (mid-Dec 2022 to 15 Jan 2023)

Session proposals can be submitted during the public call for sessions. Before submitting a session proposal, please check the preliminary programme and already suggested sessions. Rather than proposing similar sessions, you may contact conveners or directly propose modifications to already suggested or existing sessions if you would like to be involved.

When submitting a session, the following steps are required:

  • Defining the session with a title and a short scope description (200–2500 characters); you may consider mentioning related projects in your session scope.
  • Identifying the conveners and co-conveners by first name, last name, and email address. We ask you to consider different genders, career stages, and countries or institutes for your convener team.
  • Submitting your session proposal to one programme stream only.
  • Indicating other programme streams for potential co-organization.

The programme stream moderators will build the session programme from the session proposals; they can suggest merging proposed sessions that are similar. You will be informed about the acceptance of your session by email.

Session modification (until end of Jun)

The session modification enables you to define or to modify the title as well as the description of your session. This tool also provides the options to upload or link session material as well as a session summary. The options to upload or link session material as well as a session summary is available from 8 August–8 October 2023. The limit for uploading is 50 MB. If you provide a link to a video on YouTube or Vimeo, a thumbnail will automatically be displayed in the session programme.

This tool is available until the end of June. Furthermore, this tool provides you with up-to-date information and statistics about the contributions to your session during the whole period of session and programme organization. This web interface is also the starting point for all the following tools. You are kindly asked to log in by using the convener login link provided in the main menu at the top of the website.

SOI – Abstract implementation (24 Apr–6 May 2023)

During the abstract implementation phase SOI, conveners are asked to review submitted abstracts of three different types:

  • 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, conveners may upload contributions that were directly sent to them. 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 finalise 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 (25 May 2023).

The PSC asks all convener teams to conclude the task by 6 May 2023; open sessions will delay the development of the session programme. In case the convener team does not finalize the "Abstract implementation", the Programme Stream Moderators will take over and decide according to their own assessment.

SOII – Session tagging (24 Apr–6 May 2023)

In parallel to the Abstract Implementation (SOI), conveners also have the possibility to provide the PSC with any scheduling preferences (Session tagging, SOII). These may include inter-session relations such as no-overlap or back-to-back scheduling or any other information that you consider to be useful. However, SOI has to be completed first for SOII to become available.

Please note that the decision on allocation of the number of time blocks for oral and poster presentations will be done by the PSC in mid-May, 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 considerations, please use the "Optional information" box. Missing information from the SOII tool will be completed by the Programme Stream Moderators to the best of their knowledge.

The PSC will take your scheduling preferences as much as possible into account. Given the many competing preferences from conveners, there is no guarantee that all of these can be accommodated in the final session programme.

SOIII – Presentation selection (8–19 Jun 2023)

The PSC will schedule your session on a specific day at a specific time. Your session may be scheduled during one (small number of abstracts) or more time blocks (high number of abstracts); for very large sessions the scheduling may even cover more than one day. Following this, conveners are asked to:

  • Assign each abstract as oral or poster presentation and define the ordering of the presentations for both the oral and poster sessions. Information on the presentation form (onsite/online) for each abstract will be available in the system. Though no online poster preference request was possible at abstract submission, online poster presentations can be assigned, though the online display will not take place on a separate platform but on the Copernicus meetingorganizer as supporting material and/or live presentation file.
  • Assess carefully whether any of the abstracts could be selected as solicited (30min) presentation: the rationale to select a solicited paper should be based on the information in the abstract, i.e. is the work about an innovative study with interesting new findings? Does it have a clear potential for a wider interest in the community? Is it a comprehensive state-of-the-art review or about a major breakthrough?
    One solicited presentation per session is foreseen, for larger sessions one solicited presentation per 2-hour time block may be assigned, but please consider scheduling solicited presentations with great care since they will reduce the overall number of oral presentations.
  • Consider scheduling a time slot for short poster pitches; if however, your session is very short and/or has only one or two poster presentations then we recommend planning the pitches during the poster session itself in front of the posters.

With respect to scheduling of presentations by anyone on the convenor team, please consider the following recommendations:

  • A session chair should not give an oral presentation in the session block he/she is chairing (this can normally be avoided, if the session is large enough to cover more than one session block moderated by different chairs).
  • (Co-)Conveners should not give solicited talks in their own session.
  • If, after allocation of the presentation times, a number of oral preference submissions have to be assigned as poster presentations, we see it as fair if (co-)conveners first consider the poster presentation type for their own oral-preference submissions, if there are any.

Please find more details on the meeting format here.

Your selection will generate your draft session programme and here conveners are asked to:

  • Identify two (or more) chairpersons for each of the oral session blocks: To manage the tasks of a hybrid oral session we recommend that (at least) two chairpersons are coordinating the running of the session to ensure a smooth running of the hybrid event.
  • Identify two (or more) chairpersons for the poster session.

In case the convener team of a session does not finalize the "Presentation selection", the Programme Stream Moderators will take over and complete the scheduling according to the best of their knowledge and assessment.

The final meeting programme for all sessions will then be uploaded. All authors will receive their letter of schedule by email, indicating the time and type of their presentation.

Chairing your session

Oral and poster sessions are chaired by conveners or assigned chairpersons. These should be assigned during the SOIII – Presentation Selection phase (see above), but updates can also be provided at a later stage: log into the session dashboard, in the box SOIII – Presentation Selection click on "View". For the oral session parts, we strongly recommend to nominate two chairpersons for each time block to cope with the different tasks of the hybrid organization of the session (onsite Q&A and online questions and contributions).

Session materials and summary: From 8 August to 8 October 2023 you can upload files and links via your session dashboard. Session matreial, for example for a short introduction to the session, can be uploaded by conveners in advance and is then also available for display in the lecture room. You can upload a file and a link to a website. In addidion you can upload a file and a link containing a session summary. All files and links will be accessible in the conference programme and accessible for registered attendees only.
Files can be uploaded in the formats *.pdf, *.ppt/pptx, *.pps/ppsx, *.png, *.jpg, or *.mp4. The file size is limited to 50 MB, except for video files being limited to 200 MB. If using videos inside Power Point files, please embed the video. Uploaded *.mp4 video files are hosted on the EMS2023 Vimeo channel, which implies the acceptance of the Vimeo guidelines. We strongly encourage you to include closed captions in your video.
Session material and session summary files are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, please read the full licence agreement. External contents linked from the conference programme must follow the standards for an ethically correct, equitable, safe, open, and respectful environment for scientific activities.
Please find detailed information and tips on session chairing at:

Mail tool (available from 24 Apr to end of Sep 2023)

Through the mail tool conveners have the option to contact presenting authors or all authors of their session, for example to make them aware of the upload options of display material or live presentation files, or to provide guidance on how you intend to run the session.

Conveners can also use this tool to get in touch with the contact author or all authors of a specific contribution. This tool is available via a small envelope icon below the abstract number.