VOLUME 3 - ISSUE 1 - POSTER APPROVAL SESSIONS

As many of you will have noticed, the programmes for BPS meetings are getting very crowded, and despite the free buffet lunch that we hope to provide at all future meetings (courtesy of the Trade Exhibition), it is difficult to actually allocate time to eat it! There is invariably a prize lecture programmed at this time on most days. For this reason, the Meetings Committee has been reviewing the benefits of the poster approval sessions and exploring alternative mechanisms. The reason for this article is to seek your views on this.

I should, at the outset, declare my own commitment to continue refereeing and approving both poster and oral abstracts and the resulting communications at the meeting before they can be published on the Society’s E-Journal (www.pa2online.org). Our poster and oral presentations provide, what I believe, is one of the best training environments for our postgraduate students and postdoctoral fellows that there is. The “edge” provided by the prospect that the presentation could be rejected, makes the presenters (and also supervisors!) take the process very seriously indeed. This ensures that the quality of presentations is exceptionally high.

Other societies do not do this. Some referee abstracts prior to the meeting, but once accepted for the meeting there is no evaluation of the actual presentation (oral or poster). I think that this therefore loses “the edge” that we benefit from at our meetings. The Physiological Society (which for many years has had a very similar system to ours) has recently moved to refereeing abstracts prior to the meeting. From the BPS perspective, there is no suggestion that we should change how we evaluate oral communications and their associated abstracts. What I would like to do, however, is seek your views on the poster approval process.

Our current process involving a poster approval session at the end of each poster session has a number of advantages. The public presentation by the referees of their deliberations and recommendations ensures both fair play and that the job is done thoroughly. The decisions can be debated by everyone present and both the referee and authors have the opportunity to make their points in a public forum.

The referees do an excellent job and normally any issues have been sorted out with the authors and the Vice President (Meetings) well before the actual approval session. As a consequence, there is not usually much debate at the approval session itself. Nevertheless, the approval sessions take up time and we normally take at least 30 min to get through the process with all authors etc. present. So, is there a more efficient way to do this?

The Meetings Committee has suggested that we replace the approval session with a meeting between poster referees and the Vice President (Meetings) during the latter period of the actual poster session to approve the posters. This would ensure that authors are still present at their poster at the end of this referees’ meeting should there be issues to discuss further.

Such a meeting of referees should provide a forum for them to seek other opinions on difficult issues and to ensure that the job has been done thoroughly. However, it will avoid the need to detail minor changes already agreed with authors. It will also allow us to steal some time back for other activities.

This is where I need your help. Will this approval process be sufficient? Are the interests of authors, referees and the BPS adequately protected? Is there another way to do it?

Another reason for reviewing the poster approval session concerns the process of approval of posters at Focused Meetings. This has been rather ad hoc at recent focused meetings (again because of the difficulty of programming the approval session in the meeting - particularly when there is a heavy attendance by non-BPS members). I can confirm, however, that one has taken place at each focused meeting from which posters were published.

A meeting of referees to approve these posters would be easier to arrange and would ensure that all posters are treated the same, whatever the type of meeting.

What do you think? I would value your views (as both authors and referees).

Steve Hill
Vice-President (Meetings)