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 Copernicus Office Meeting Organizer.

We are grateful to all conveners for their voluntary work, as EPSC-DPS 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-DPS committee member) as this would add an unfeasible financial burden to all EPSC-DPS 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 the Europlanet Society) 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). The member of the convener team who submits a session proposal agrees to become the point of contact for the session for session-specific communication with authors and conference organizers. This means that their email address would be listed alongside their name on the programme. Changes to the point of contact and/or additional points of contact can be appointed at a later stage. Here, personal details such as telephone number and email of other (co-)conveners are only displayed if permitted by the user. To do this, please log in to your personal data 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 (for example w.r.t. research institute, nationality, gender, career stage,...);
  • Advertise your session to your scientific community;
  • Organize your session in terms of contributions and schedule requests;
  • Invite speakers reflecting the diverse scientific community (note that each session should not have more than one solicited speaker per expected oral block based on previous session experience (one oral block will be assigned per ~15 accepted abstracts; solicited speakers may also be selected later on 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-DPS EPSC Code of Conduct.

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, once your session has been accepted and implemented in the session programme. 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 tools mentioned below.

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

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.

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.

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 EPSC-DPS2025 media team will select stories for the media based on submitted abstracts, and will endeavour to ensure that EPSC-DPS2025 press releases are representative of the full range of research presented at the meeting and the diverse community, and take into account the balance of gender, career age and nationality as far as possible. You are therefore asked to select those abstracts in your session which may be of interest for 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 representative regions etc.).

After having completed the SOI task, you will have the final list of active contributions to be scheduled in your session as 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 as 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 talk, solicited talk (with different talk length options) and dissertation talk;
  • Define the ordering of the talks and posters.

The dissertation talk is a longer oral presentation and is part of the scientific sessions. It is intended for PhD candidates who are in the final stages of their doctorate or have just completed it.

All early career researchers who have completed their PhD up to one year before EPSC-DPS2025 (i.e. after August 2024) or who will complete their PhD up to 6 months after EPSC-DPS2025 (i.e. before March 2026) are eligible to apply for a dissertation talk. The application is based on a trusted basis and no proof is required.

If the candidate is selected for an oral presentation, it will be at the discretion of the session conveners whether the oral presentation can be designated as a dissertation talk and whether additional time can be allocated within the session.

Motivation for this format: The dissertation talk will allow the candidates to present their work as a whole and give them a spotlight in a most crucial stage of their scientific career, especially since the pandemic and virtual meetings strongly affected the visibility of the next generation of scientists.

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.