Europlanet Science Congress 2020
Virtual meeting
21 September – 9 October 2020
Europlanet Science Congress 2020
Virtual meeting
21 September – 9 October 2020
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Guidelines for conveners and chairpersons

Conveners and co-conveners will be requested to chair and moderate their online sessions or nominate in advance one or more chairpersons to take responsibility for the session. In addition, meeting participants may be nominated by the appropriate convener(s) or asked by the meeting organizers to act as chairperson of a particular online session.

Below is a brief description of the duties of the chairpersons. Please also see the guidelines for oral presentations, the guidelines for poster presentations and the EPSC Code of Conduct.

1. Private presentations

Due to author copyright privileges, it is prohibited to share any scientific material, (including forwarding the presentation file, taking photos/screenshots and/or copying electronically), on a platform other than the EPSC2020 website if a presenter has marked their presentation as “private”. Conveners/chairpersons should reinforce this message at start of discussions on the comment thread for their session, as well as at the beginning of their session showcase by showing the “Housekeeping” slide (this will be circulated prior to the meeting).

You can identify the "private" presentations by the following icons for the oral and posters respectively:

2. Technical assistance

Copernicus staff (epsc2020@copernicus.org) will be available throughout the duration of the virtual congress to provide support to the conveners/chairpersons and speakers in setting up and managing the live sessions as well as the asynchronous thread discussions. They will assist with any technical problems, should they arise.

3. Conducting the session

3.1 The weeks before the conference and last-minute duties

Please monitor your session through the session modification tool up to the scheduled presentation time.

Session programme

If you have any modifications in your session programme after uploading the final meeting programme, please forward this information directly to the conference organizer (epsc2020@copernicus.org).

Late withdrawals

We kindly ask authors to withdraw abstracts as early as possible when they realize they will not be able to submit their presentation. Early withdrawal allows conveners to better prepare the session showcases. If no presentation is uploaded for a submitted abstract and the abstract is neither withdrawn nor the convener is informed of any special circumstances, the abstract will be withdrawn from the online programme afterwards.

Checking presentations

Authors are requested to submit their presentations by 7 September 2020 to enable us to check and upload all the display materials. If we find that a presentation significantly contravenes the oral or poster guidelines (e.g. the video lasts over 15 minutes or the poster is in A0 format), the session convener will be asked to contact the author and ask them to resubmit it in the correct format.

Last-minute duties

  1. Session modification: Log in to your session dashboard. Here, you can edit your chairpersons (via the tool SOIII – Presentation selection), add public information to your session to be shown to the people reading the online programme, and find the mailing list of your session authors if there is any final information you would like to provide.
  2. Contact your authors and chairpersons by email to remind them about the session showcase and any other planned events that might be relevant to your session. Please check the Keynote Lectures, Guests Interviews, Community Events and other parts of the programme for content that you think might be of interest to participants in your session.
  3. Withdrawn abstracts: Take a look at your programme online to see whether you have any abstracts marked as withdrawn.

3.2 During the virtual conference

Oral and poster discussions will be asynchronous

Conveners and/or their nominated chairpersons should monitor frequently the asynchronous discussion forum for their overall session and the thread-based comment system linked to each oral and poster presentation. These Q&A tools enable interaction across multiple time zones and will be accessible to registered participants throughout the meeting. The asynchronous discussions last for the full duration of the virtual conference from 21 September to 9 October. Conveners/chairpersons should encourage discussions by posting initial "welcome" comments and inviting questions.

Conveners/chairpersons are also requested to act as moderators for the asynchronous discussion related to their session. Participants will be able to report any inappropriate content or behaviour they observe to the conference organizer, via the built-in reporting system. Where action is required by the convener/chairperson of the relevant session, they will be notified of the issue by the conference organizer and requested to take steps.

Session showcases

Showcases are online sessions of 20 minutes in which conveners or their nominated chairpersons will select and present highlights of the presentations or posters from their sessions (N.B. sessions with more than 40 abstracts have been allocated two consecutive time slots, resulting in a showcase lasting 40 minutes). The objective of the showcase is to encourage meeting participants to view and interact with the asynchronous oral and poster presentations in each session. Note that in most showcases there will be no time to introduce all the different presentations of the session, so chairpersons should summarize the highlights. Conveners/chairpersons are expected to ensure that their showcase session is diverse and representative of the full range of research submitted for their session, as well as the gender, nationality and career ages of the contributing authors (please ensure that presentations by early career researchers are highlighted).

Conveners/chairpersons are free to organise their showcase as they think best fits the content and scope of their session. An efficient way of doing this could be by grouping presentations into topical themes (e.g. Presentations A, B and C in Session OPS3 give an interesting perspective on Titan’s upper atmosphere; presentations X, Y and Z relate to future missions). Conveners/chairpersons may also want to highlight notable results, or draw attention to on-going discussions in the comment threads, etc.

Presentations marked "private" may be mentioned in the session showcase but no details should be given of their scientific content beyond what is included in the publicly-available abstract.

You can identify the "private" presentations by the following icons for the oral and posters respectively:

Conveners/chairpersons are requested to start the session by showing a “Housekeeping” slide with a reminder of the EPSC Code of Conduct and other important information for participants.