Division Executive – December Update

[Mark Mullaly]

Dear Divisional Executive team members:

First off, best wishes for the holidays! Congratulations on making it to the end of the year, and we hope that you can step back, breathe and have a bit of a rest over the holiday season.

A quick update on a few key items for those of you who are keeners, and are looking on the holiday season as an opportunity to get all those follow-ups crossed off your list.

Call for Papers

The call for papers was released and forwarded to you earlier this month. Please feel free to forward this on to your networks, within and beyond your institutions.

Reviewers

Just a reminder that you should ideally be putting the call out for reviewers early in the new year, if you haven’t already. As we talked about in the workshop, attracting a solid base of reviewers is a multi-pronged and intensive marketing effort. You’re encouraged to follow up with your networks, with speakers and reviewers from previous years, and others who have volunteered with your division.

Reviewer Form

Google forms have been created for each division to share with potential reviewers to collect their interest and information. You are not obliged to use this form, but it is available to you if you choose and find it of value. You may adapt the form to your needs, including copying and creating French versions – they were not automatically translated in this case because not all the divisions use them, but Tara can create one for you if required. You can send the form directly via the button in the top right hand corner of the Google form, and/ or share the link to your divisional members. You will be able to read and download responses from the second tab (top centre of the page).

The forms have been shared from our Google Drive. Only the divisional editors have been added as collaborators, but if you require another officer to have editing rights, please let Tara know and she can get you set up.

Divisional Events

We have space for a couple more divisional events in the overall program. We are working this year to stagger them over the conference, so that there aren’t competing divisional speakers in the same time slot. If you have a divisional speaker or other event you would like to propose, there is still some time to get me the information (but I would need to know by 8 January 2021 at the latest).

Scholar One Availability

We are just about to go live with Scholar One to manage the submission process. We expect to have it available and linked from the web site early the week of 4 January.

Scholar One Updates

We have made a couple of updates this year that we want to draw your attention to:
– While papers are submitted to only one division, we have created an option to identify a secondary division, to allow identification of another division that might be interested in a paper. This won’t affect the review process, but should help identifying joint session opportunities once we get to programming the selected papers.
– All presenting authors of a submission can now be identified, rather than just selecting one.
– We have created scorecards for each of the submission types, as were used in the past. There are also views for each submission type that will limit the scoring criteria to that particular submission type, as well as a consolidated view that shows all submissions (and that still identifies which criteria belong to which submission type).
– We will be making a role available for Program Coordinators to see review results and be able to build their programs.

More on all the above once the site is available.

DivExec

This communication has also been posted in the DivExec forum (and is the last one we plan to communicate by email) on the asac.ca web site (Direct link: https://asac.ca/forums/). We’d like to encourage everyone to keep an eye on the forum, and use for any questions or planning communication, so that everyone can be seeing the same information and hearing the same message the same way.

That’s it from this end. Some more exciting announcements planned for the new year.

In the meantime, we wish you a safe and happy holiday season, and all of the best for a great 2021. We look forward to working with you towards an amazing conference this year.

All our best wishes,
MRT (Mark, Rory & Tara)

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