Application and selection procedure for OSPP contest
10 February 2023
Table of contents
Application procedures for an OSPP Award
The Union presents a number of special awards, including the Outstanding Student and PhD candidate Presentation (OSPP) Award. The division OSPP Co-ordinators are nominated by the relevant division president and approved during the annual division meeting. The Council nominates an EGU OSPP Award Co-ordinator to supervise the programme groups’ OSPP Co-ordinators.
Criteria for application
Eligibility for the Outstanding Student and PhD candidate Presentation (OSPP) Award is limited to participants who:
- are first author and personally present a poster or PICO at the conference; and
- satisfy one of the following criteria:
- are a current BSc or MSc student or PhD candidate; or
- are a recent BSc or MSc student or PhD candidate (conferral of degree after 1 January of the year of the conference) who are presenting their thesis work.
Please note that each first author can register only one abstract (poster or PICO) for the OSPP contest at the General Assembly.
Application procedure
With the letter of schedule, authors are informed about the final form of their presentation: oral, poster, or PICO. In case of poster or PICO, students fulfilling the above criteria can register for OSPP by selecting the respective link in the letter of schedule. In case of more than one poster and/or PICO presentation as a first author, students are asked to decide which presentation should be included in the OSPP contest. The student names are then forwarded to the OSPP Co-ordinators of the respective programme group. Authors receive a confirmation email after the OSPP registration deadline (which is about two weeks after the letter of schedule).
Selection procedure
Candidates for the OSPP award attach the OSPP label (blue PNG, yellow PNG) to their presentation material.
In addition, they can download a QR code of their online presentation page at the bottom of that page and include the QR code in their PICO or poster presentation.
In case that a judge was not able to attend the PICO or poster presentation, the uploaded supplementary material may be reverted to in exceptional cases. It is therefore mandatory for all OSPP participants to upload supplementary material file(s).
The OSPP Co-ordinator of each programme group informs all OSPP Contact Conveners about the OSPP abstracts to be judged in their session and asks them to nominate at least three judges for each presentation before the meeting. The conveners should obtain prior consent from the judges or select judges from the list of volunteers provided in the OSPP Nominator Tool. Conveners are explicitly invited to nominate themselves as judges within their session as long as they are not conflicted.
Evaluation forms for each OSPP presentation will then be made available to all judges via a personal link to the OSPP online system. These forms include a number of criteria to be evaluated by the judges. Criteria include the scientific quality of the presentation, the design, and the student’s ability to answer questions, with marks given from 0 to 10.
The judges evaluate the presentations at the General Assembly during the poster session or the PICO viewing time, respectively. Note that the two-minute presentation of PICOs is not part of the award evaluation. Each judge is expected to interact with the applicant during the poster/PICO session because this both guarantees some extra attendance and because the applicant’s ability to describe and defend their work is part of the OSPP evaluation criteria. The judges are asked to work confidentially. The judges then fill in the evaluation forms online.
In addition, all registered EGU participants are invited to vote on OSPP presentations, as long as they are neither BSc or MSc students or PhD candidates themselves, are not participating in OSPP, are not a co-author of the presentation, and do not share the same affiliation as the first author. The link to the evaluation form is directly available on the online presentation page for easy access.
After the General Assembly, each programme group’s OSPP Co-ordinator proposes a ranking among all the participating posters and PICOs (one combined list) in the programme group based on average marks that are automatically compiled from all evaluation forms and based on diversity criteria. The number of awards in each division should depend on the quality and the number of participating presentations that year. In general, the number of awards should be small to keep the contest competitive and the award a special distinction. The OSPP Co-ordinator and the division president decide on the awards based on the ranking no later than two months after the General Assembly.
Please confer the OSPP overview page for possible changes in the contest regulations for this year.
Award presentation
Each awardee is notified by the EGU OSPP Award Co-ordinator. Awardees are asked to submit a short statement on affiliation and research interests (two to three sentences), a portrait photo, and their PICO presentation or a PDF of their poster to the EGU Office. The information is published on the EGU OSPP Awards section of the website. The awardees receive a conference fee waiver for the next EGU General Assembly and are invited to submit a paper (of which the awardee is first author) free of publication costs to one of the EGU journals. At the respective division meeting held at the next General Assembly, each awardee receives an award certificate.