Sylvie Květinová, Krisztína Pavlíčková and Kateřina Kleinová (EAA Secretariat staff, helpdesk@e-a-a.org)
This year is the first year that EAA has taken a central role in the organisation of an Annual Meeting. It is a development that has given rise to a significant new workload and a new set of responsibilities for the EAA Secretariat. We have worked hard to improve the quality of Annual Meeting organisation and, hopefully, the level of satisfaction of all participants involved. However, given the size of this year’s Annual Meeting, there were some practical issues that inevitably arose. This short article aims to clarify the reasons for some of the ‘glitches’ and hopes to explain what happens with the submissions and contributions of members from the time submissions are made to the point of presentation at the Annual Meeting.
The work required to prepare a session and work towards presenting a paper or poster at an EAA Annual Meeting is something familiar to most of our EAA members. Following significant scholarly endeavour and the run up towards the EAA Annual Meeting deadlines to submit proposals on-line, the latter is hopefully relatively easy. However, if this was not your experience we would welcome your views, or even your shared frustrations at
helpdesk@e-a-a.org (if you have not done so already). This will help us to improve our systems next year and in the future.
In order to submit a session or presentation proposal, you need to have an EAA membership account. You can choose to renew your membership and register for the Annual Meeting in stages, according to the deadlines set for each. Any changes you wish to make to your profile are to be made in relation to your EAA membership record (not your registration entry); the only exception is institutional affiliation which can relate specifically to a particular submission.
Once you have identified a session co-organiser from a country different to yours (to ensure international cooperation) you can submit your session. Each session proposal is reviewed by two Scientific Committee members who can accept, reject, recommend for revision or suggest for merger with another similarly themed session. Following the evaluation by the Scientific Committee, the EAA Secretariat opens all approved sessions (that fulfil also all formal criteria) for the submission of abstracts for oral or poster presentations. These are reviewed by the respective session organisers who accept or reject proposals, or discuss required changes directly with the author.
Notification of acceptance is sent by the EAA Secretariat and a list of accepted contributions is published on the Annual Meeting web site. Admittedly, this year, this system did not ensure that these acceptance / rejection notifications reached everybody as planned; we understand that some authors were still wondering three months from submission deadline whether their contribution had been accepted or not. Next year, we will aim for a double feedback to authors from both session organisers and from the EAA Secretariat in order to ensure that no one is missed out.
When a paper or poster is rejected by a session organiser (e.g. if it does not match the session’s subject scope) the Scientific Committee, with the approval of the session organiser, recommends reallocation to another session. If there is no suitable session, the contribution may be assigned to a general session, again with the approval of the author. Once finalised, the Scientific Committee and EAA Secretariat review all approved sessions to ensure they have the minimum required number of oral presentations (six) – and that they are not too long. In addition, they have to meet the scientific standards of EAA Annual Meetings. The Scientific Committee also estimates the room size required for each session.
Programme creation is a complex task involving multiple criteria. Timing clashes, in particular, are avoided for session organisers and those presenting more than one paper. While sessions are the basic cornerstone of EAA Annual Meetings, many delegates seem to be omnipresent and hence timetable conflicts this year could only be resolved at the level of 2-hours blocks and not for entire sessions. Thematically akin sessions, identified by the Scientific Committee, are intended not to run in parallel. Specific requests by authors for timing sessions or presentations were also taken into account where possible and will also be in the future. These aspects are always conditioned by the number of lecture rooms available.
All this information translates into a complicated matrix. The Secretariat and the Scientific Committee have worked with more than 50 different versions of the programme before a final schedule was identified that accommodated most requirements. As members you are all aware of the huge level of interaction that occurs when so many sessions are required and so many papers need to be presented. It is unfortunately Mission Impossible to achieve a clash-free programme in such a complex situation. All this means that, ultimately, there can only be limited flexibility for last minute scheduling demands, not to mention the unwelcome pitfalls created by late cancellations. Therefore, the printed programme reflects all those changes made before 23 July. Any later alterations to the programme will be announced on-line and in errata offprint.
The success of the Annual Meeting in 2018 is now up to you, the delegates. We are really excited about it and have enjoyed preparing it for you. Thank you for the 34 MB of positive emails received from you at
helpdesk@e-a-a.org. We like to, and try to, give personal attention to everyone.
We look forward to your further feedback and specially to seeing you all in Barcelona.
Go back to top