EAFES (East Asian Federation of Ecological Societies)

"Why are we so inflexible? - Reasons for requesting strict compliance with the deadlines and regulations"

• The 5th EAFES International Congress requests strict compliance with the deadlines for proposals for symposia, presentation applications, registration, and submission of abstracts. Delayed proposals, applications, registrations, and submissions after the deadlines will not be acceptable. Adjustments to the presentation schedule and personal requests will not be undertaken. Here is the reason why we are so inflexible and request your understanding and cooperation to the policy. 

• The 5th EAFES International Congress is administered through the collaboration of two organizations, the Organizing Committee and Scientific Committee, in conjunction with the 59th Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of Japan (ESJ59). In neither committees of the EAFES5 and ESJ59 are members full-time employees for administering the Congress and Meeting. 

• Since all the committee members are voluntary, the participants are responsible to the members for development of a plain system of meeting organization and relief of burdens upon the committee members. 

• Development of a simple system of automatic processing is indispensible to lighten the workload of members and reduce human error. All the processes of proposals, applications, registrations, and submissions are handled online through the system developed by the ESJ. Electronic data saved on the ESJ server lend themselves to automatic processing and help to reduce manually handled tasks. 

• The ESJ has a good system for editing the abstract book which can bundle a stack of manuscripts in a few minutes. But, a single delayed manuscript creates a labor-some task of manually reediting the book. To include delayed manuscripts in the abstract book, they must be appended one by one by hand. Furthermore, additional jobs to eliminate inconsistencies in the program, list of participants, abstract book and information on the web are cumbersome. Avoidance of manual revision is necessary not only for labor-saving but also for preventing errors. 

• Each deadline is scheduled to sequentially handle many tasks necessary for organizing the Congress within the calculated amount of time. A delay of a task affects the starting time of the subsequent tasks. To eliminate the delay and finish every task in time, committee members must spend excess time in cost of time for education, research, sleep, communication with friends and family members and so on. 

• The allotment work of a large number of poster presentations and assemblies is in itself a major undertaking difficult to automate. An attempt to change the schedule of an assembly or alignment sequence of two posters for convenience of organizers and presenters will trigger a domino effect of successively creating needs of change. 

• Each participant may have different circumstances. However, a single request from a person in hundred will give rise to a pile of emails and tasks for many committee members. A bulk of such requests and enquiries come from inattention of participants to registration number, password, and etc. For the Organizing and Scientific Committee, it is almost impossible to judge which of many specific personal reasons are really serious, and the only possible solution is to decline all the requests. 

• You may think that 'one day or even an hour late is acceptable.' However, the delay may force committee members to start over already finished tasks. You need not wait to propose, apply, register, and submit until just before the deadlines. Early birds can get peace of mind. We would like to recommend you to do everything one day or even a week before the deadlines. 

The Organizing & Scientific Committee of the 5th EAFES International Congress