Programming Questions – Ensuring Author Registration

[Mark Mullaly]

In response to questions received about the program coordinator role, and in particular ensuring author registration:

1. What does it mean when it says primary division none? (I see myself in that list too, although I believe I registered with the HR division)

The primary division is identified in the context of the question “What division are you presenting in?” (Secondary is “are you also presenting in another one?”) It is only relevant for paper presenters. You will see that you also answered the question “Are you presenting?” with “No.”

2. Would you advise to follow up only with presenters/chairs/discussants who arenot on this list, or send a reminder to register email to allpresenters/chairs/discussants (if there is a way to send a mass email)?

The principle requirement is to ensure everyone is registered. If you have something to communicate to other authors, chairs and discussants, then by all means communicate with them, but the focus is on those who have not registered.

3. A follow up on that, is there a way to send a mass email to all accepted presenters, chairs and discussants from Scholar One, for Program Coordinators? I reviewed the video from April 8 meeting, and it looks like the Editors have this option to email all/selected in the Reviewers tab, but I don’t see anything like that for PCs.

Editors only get to send mass emails to reviewers (because that is usually generalized and not personalized). They still have to send emails to paper authors individually using the system. So no, I’m afraid there is no mass email capability to send email to authors, chairs and discussants. You can always export the data to Excel and email directly to a larger list (I suggest using the bcc field if you do).

If you would like to mail by the system, the easiest way is to:
– draft your email separately in a text editor or word processor
– copy the email to the clipboard
– click on each author (or chair, or discussant) that you wish to email
– paste your email between the greeting and salvation

It’s surprisingly fast to do.

4. On a side note, somewhere in the Survival Guide I read that we have to send full papers from the session to Chairs and Discussants. However, I am concerned if that is a safe practice. For example, in our division, all authors who were considered for full text in Proceedings requested to not be included as full-text, because paper is being considered for publication. So, sending full text of the paper to chairs and discussants would violate this request. Is it possible to send the Chairs and Discussants the titles and abstracts only?

What the Survival Guide says is that a you are encouraged to send the full papers to chairs and discussants, not that you have to. However, I would agree with the idea that this is encouraged. I would find it awfully difficult to do anything meaningful as a discussant (and chairs will be far better prepped to lead their session) if I have no idea what it says in the paper I’m discussing. That would be a little bit like “the author asked us not to publish the full text, so we can’t send the paper to the reviewers, and they have to do their review based on the abstract.”

The distinction here is about publishing of the paper, vs. sharing it with a single person that has a role to play in its presentation.

Publishing the full text in the proceedings means it is now published, and cannot be re-submitted elsewhere. As a developmental conference, that is why so many divisions publish an abstracts-only proceedings. The author is free to present their paper and get feedback, and then revise and submit that paper for publication to a journal after the conference.

That said, I would strongly DISCOURAGE sending the papers any more broadly than that. Authors may choose to share papers with each other, or members of the audience that request them. I would not set a precedent of “let’s send the papers to everyone planning on attending the session.”

Hope that helps.

Mark

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