■ General Instructions / Notices for Participant

ESJ68 is the first online annual meeting of the Ecological Society of Japan. Since there are many new implementations, please read the information about the 68th Annual Meeting carefully, and check the latest information on the ESJ68 official website.

For all participants

Meeting bylaws

ESJ68 will be held in accordance with the bylaws of the Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of Japan. Participants are requested to be aware of these bylaws and the following notes, and follow the instructions from the Organizing Committee members and chairpersons.

Registration

We will use Confit Publication to prepare a portal site that will be the venue of ESJ68. Participants will need an individual ID and a password to enter the portal site.
The individual ID and password will be notified by email by March 5 to those who registered as participants to ESJ68 by February 17, 2021, and paid the registration fee by March 1, 2021.
Please note that it will not be possible to register on the days of ESJ68. Even if you are an undergraduate and younger (junior high school and high school) student who is not charged a registration fee, if you will be an audience using a workshop ticket, or if you wish to only participate in the ecology course for high school students, please be sure to apply for your participation by February 17, 2021, via ESJ68 official website
The portal site will be opened from March 3 to 09:00 (JST) April 5, 2021.
The program book of ESJ68 will not be printed. The meeting information will be available to the participants on the ESJ68 official website or the portal site.
The abstracts will be available from late February.
The audience that will be using a workshop ticket and the high school students that will participate only in the ecology course will receive a URL link for their participation via email by March 5, 2021.

Preparation of an optimal environment for internet connection

ESJ68 will be held on a portal site using the Confit Publication. All meetings and oral presentations will be conducted in real-time using the Zoom Webinar and Zoom Meetings. Please make sure that you had checked how to use these online tools, and please confirm the correct stability of your internet connection in advance. The Organizing Committee will not be able to assist the participants with their equipment, access to Zoom or internet connection troubles on the meeting days.
We recommend the participants to use of earphones or headsets with microphones, as the microphone in the PCs might have problems (poor sound quality, picking up the sound of the PC fans, feedback, etc.).

Zoom Settings

In Zoom, please display the name that you entered on your registration of the annual meeting. (Example: “Charles Darwin; XX Univ.”).
In Zoom Meetings, please mute your own microphone except when indicated by the chairperson, in cases such as your presentation or Q&A sessions. If you want to make a question, please follow the instructions of the chairperson in charge of each room.
The chairperson could ask a person to leave if he/she considers that the person is interfering with the presentation. In this case, please re-check your Zoom settings and log-in again.
During the Zoom Webinar sessions (Symposia, Workshops and Forums), the participants must mute their microphones. Please follow the instructions of the organizers for details on how to ask questions.
The maximum number of the participants of each venue is as follows: Oral presentation and sessions using Zoom Meetings: 300 accounts; Sessions using Zoom Webinar, Room A: 1000 accounts; Sessions using Zoom Webinar, Room B-H: 500 accounts. So, please do not enter multiple venues at the same time using multiple devices and accounts.
Please check for updates and use the latest version of Zoom.

Comments on the Confit Publication

In each presentation page in the portal site, a public comment field will be provided for text communication between the presenters and the audience. You can use this field if you are unable to ask the questions during the presentation.
The maximum length of each comment is 1,000 characters. If it exceeds 1,000 characters, please divide it into multiple comments.
The public comment field of each presentation is available at any time during the publication period of the portal site.
The Organizing Committee reserves the rights to delete any content that is deemed offensive to the public order and morals.

Notes on the online holding

URL links for Zoom Meetings and login ID for Confit Publication will be sent by e-mail only to the participants who have registered for the annual meeting and paid the registration fee. Do not disclose or lend the URL links and login ID that you received to others.
Recording and storing presentations and posters are permitted only with the approval of the presenters. Please do not store the contents of the presentations of any type without the permission, including saving screen shots and recording using other devices.

Childcare fee assistance

Ecological Society of Japan will reimburse a portion of the childcare fees (e.g. the use of a sitter or temporary care at a daycare center) used by the participants in their resident area after the annual meeting. The receipts or other forms of documents showing the use of local childcare systems are required for the assistance. The period of assistance is Wednesday, March 17 through Sunday, March 21, 2021. Up to 50% of your total expenditure will be reimbursed with the maximum being 5,000 yen per day per child, but there is no limit to the number of children. However, in case the number of applicants exceeds our limit, then the subsidy amount may be reduced.
For more information, please visit the ESJ68 official website.

Consideration of persons with disabilities

Ecological Society of Japan will take into consideration the people with disabilities based on the “Act for Eliminating Discrimination Against Persons with Disabilities”. If you need any special support when attending the annual meeting, please contact us through the contact page on the official web site.

Cancellation policy

Cancellation Policy for Registration Fees of the Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of Japan

If a participant cancels prior to the refund deadline announced for each annual meeting, a refund will be made except for bank transfer fees and other expenses.
In principle, no refunds will be made after the announced refund deadline for each annual meeting.

The Ecological Society of Japan

Handling of research results when unable to give a presentation at ESJ68

For speakers who have registered their abstracts and paid the conference registration fee by the due date, the Ecological Society of Japan will approve their presentation information and abstracts on our website as their achievements at the meeting, even if they are unable to give their presentations due to the following reasons;

Cancellation of the annual meeting due to fire, earthquake, meteorological disaster, man-made disaster, infectious disease, etc.
Failure of the annual meeting platform or large-scale network failure

However, if the conference registration fee is not paid by the due date, the information and abstracts of the speakers will be removed from our website where the abstracts are published, and the relevant research will not be recognized as an achievement, even if it is mentioned in the program.

The Ecological Society of Japan

Communication in case of emergencies in ESJ68 (e.g., failure of the conference platform)

Priorities for communication and dissemination before and during the annual meeting are as follows

Sending e-mails to members and conference participants
Dissemination of information on the conference website
Dissemination of information on the ESJ website and the conference platform site

For presenters

Precautions about the presentation materials

All online lectures, oral or posters, are publicly transmitted under copyright laws, so permissions are required. Please be careful not to cause copyright infringements and avoid any defamation in the presentation contents, on the slides shared on-screen, or on the PDF poster that you submit. When quoting a published work, please be sure to specify the source. In the unlikely event that the content of the writing (presentation slide or PDF poster) infringes the copyright of a third party or causes damage to a third party, the presenter will be liable for it.

General lectures (Oral presentations)

Oral presentations and Q&A sessions will be made in real-time via Zoom Meetings. Each speaker will share the screen of the presentation slides from their own PCs. Therefore, there are no special requirements for the OS, file format, or maximum file size.
To ensure smooth operation of the oral presentations, a rehearsal with a professional support staff will be held in early March. Please consider the advices given by the supporting staff. The details of the rehearsal will be announced on the ESJ68 official website.
Please note that we cannot provide refunds or support you during the meeting days, in cases of problems related to your own environment.
The total presentation time is 15 minutes: 12 minutes for presentation and 3 minutes for Q&A. Please be punctual. There will be no bells to inform you of the elapsed time. Please manage your timing on your own.
When you finish your presentation, please introduce the following presenter as a chairperson. The first chairperson of each session will be a member of the Organizing Committee.

English Presentation Award

In order to promote research presentations in English and create more opportunities for discussions with international students and participants from abroad, the English Presentation Audience Award (EPAA) will be given through voting by the audience online. The purpose of this award is to promote "scientific communication" using English at the meeting. Applicants are encouraged to make efforts to communicate their research results in an understandable manner to a wide audience, assuming that many of the audience members are not native English speakers and that they have a high diversity of research backgrounds.
In addition to the number of votes (the number of "Likes"), the voting rate (the number of "Likes"/the number of audience members) will be used to determine the winners of the EPAA. When voting, please listen to the whole speech of the presentations and make a fair judgment based on the contents.
The English oral presentation sessions (Oral presentation [E]) will be conducted in the same way as the general oral presentation sessions, so please refer to the "Oral presentations" section.
Rehearsals for English presentation speakers will be also held in early March. The details of the rehearsals sessions will be announced on the ESJ68 official website.
The chairperson of the English oral presentation sessions will be selected independently by the Organizing Committee members in charge of each session.
The list of winners will be posted on the conference website as soon as it is finalized. The winners will be also announced at the ESJ68 Awards Ceremony on March 20th.
No EPAA ceremony for the winners will be held. The award certificate (electronic files) will be sent to the winners by e-mail. For details of the EPAA, please refer to the ESJ68 official website.

General lectures (Poster presentations)

The poster presentations will be conducted in a format that participants can freely view the poster files uploaded to the portal site that will be the venue for the ESJ68. You can browse it at any time while the portal site is open, as long as the poster files are uploaded.
Questions and answers will be held as appropriate using the comment field provided for each presentation.
A core time (March 18, 11:30-13:30; March 19, 12:00-14:00) will be set similarly to the conventional local ESJ meetings. Please be proactive at responding the questions and comments during core time.
You may organize and make your own Zoom meeting, etc. to make presentations or Q&A sessions in real time as appropriate. Please use the comment field as appropriate for URL announcements, etc.
Please create the poster file in PDF format without audio or video embedding. You can include links to videos, etc., in the PDF file. The file size should be 10MB or less. There are no particular specifications regarding the appearance of the poster file, such as aspect ratio or number of pages, but please try to make it so that the audience can understand the research content without any oral supplementary explanation. Please do not set a security password for the PDF. For other detailed notes on the poster file, please see here.　There are two ways to upload the poster file: (1) pre-upload from the Online Registration System and (2) direct upload by the presenter to the portal site.。
For the pre-upload mentioned in (1), it is necessary to submit the file from the Online Registration System by February 25, 2021, and the file download and text copy prevention settings will be done at that time. The uploaded files will be available on the ESJ68 portal site by the day before the ESJ68.
For the direct upload mentioned in (2), the download prevention cannot be set, but you can upload files by yourself at any time after opening the portal site. However, if you do not upload the file by the core time, it may be treated as unpublished, so please prepare it early.
If you will upload the poster directly by yourself, please log in to the ESJ68 portal site and upload it on your own presentation page. For details on how to upload, refer to this manual.
Regardless of how the poster is uploaded, please do not try to download the presentation files without the consent of the presenters.

Poster Award.

The Ecological Society of Japan awards excellent poster presentations to encourage students. The important criteria in the selection are the information transmission ability of the poster and the quality of the research. In addition, if multiple posters achieve a same score after the review, the poster that can be better understood in English will be ranked higher.
Please note that if the poster file has not been uploaded by March 17, it may not be subject to review. Also, please refrain from replacing poster files during the ESJ68. Details on how to manage the Poster Award and the selection criteria can be found in the "Poster Award" section of the information on the ESJ68 official website.
The list of winners will be posted and announced on the ESJ68 website as soon as they are confirmed. Winners will be sent a certificate (an electronic file) by email at a later date.
The "Best Poster Award" winning poster will be displayed on the top page of the ESJ68 portal site even after the ESJ68 period ends.

Sessions (Symposia, Workshops, and Forums)

There will not be timekeepers for any of the sessions. Organizers and presenters are requested to pay attention to the time management and finish within the limit time. Extensions of time are not allowed.
The sessions will be held online in real-time via Zoom Webinar or Zoom Meetings.
For the symposia, a professional operator will provide online support for the operation of Zoom to ensure the smooth operation. For workshops and forums, there will not be online support by the professional operator, so organizers should try to manage the smooth operation of Zoom in their environment.
As with the general oral presentations, a rehearsal will be held in early March for all sessions in early March. The details of the rehearsal will be announced on the ESJ68 official website.