(last revised 2004)

The following are general guidelines to aid in preparation of organizing a symposium proposal for an annual SICB meeting.

I. General

II. Publication of Symposium

III. Funding

I. General

To develop a divisional or co-sponsoring society symposium please follow the steps listed below:

1. Contact your primary Divisional or Co-sponsoring Society Program Officer to discuss your ideas (check the SICB website if you do not know who these individuals are and for their contact information). Find out what other symposia your division or co-sponsoring society might be sponsoring and their priorities. Inquire about funding. Ask about contacting other divisions or co-sponsoring societies for further support; there is no reason why several divisions and/or co-sponsoring societies can not jointly sponsor divisional symposia.

2. If your Divisional Program Officer gives you a go-ahead, look at the symposium proposal application page on the SICB website <http://sicb.org>. Among other items the form will ask that you contact prospective speakers and invite them to join your symposium. This can be an exhilarating experience as you share your ideas with others in your field. It would be good to get their commitment to attend regardless of funding, or at least find out how much funding they would need to attend. Don't promise them funding, but let them know that their registration fees will be reimbursed, provided you apply for outside funding. We recommend that you do not plan for more than 11 talks initially (this would correspond to a full-day symposium). Note that applications are due about a year and a half before the symposium will occur.

3. In planning your symposium please note that symposium talks are 30 minutes in length. We strongly encourage one-day symposia, although half-day or two half days will also be approved (a morning session may have up to 7 speakers, an afternoon session may have up to 4 speakers). Due to scheduling problems and consideration for contributed papers, one-and-a-half-day, or two-day symposia will be discouraged. Associated socials, contributed paper or poster sessions may be scheduled as part of the symposium session sponsored by the symposium organizers. Indeed, we're open to any and all suggestions to bring exciting, innovative, synthetic symposia to our meetings.

4. Complete the Symposium Application Form on the SICB website and submit it by the due date. It will be forwarded to your Program Officer(s) and Sue Burk. The Program Committee (Program Officer(s) and the Divisional Program Officers) will review the proposals at a meeting in September, select a number of the symposia, and will notify all proposal submitters within a few weeks after the decisions have been made. The dates for each symposium will be scheduled several months after symposia are selected (about six months before the symposium is to be held); symposium organizers will be contacted for scheduling preferences and every effort will be made to accommodate these preferences.

5. You may instead want to develop a society-wide symposium. These are symposia that are deemed of interest to most of the divisions but not primarily of any one or several divisions. Your Divisional Program Officer may suggest a society-wide symposium for you after discussing your ideas with you. Or you may decide yourself that you want to develop such a symposium. To develop a society-wide symposium, follow all the steps for divisional symposia stated above, except in addition you should also contact your Program Officer to discuss your ideas and see how they fit with plans an upcoming annual SICB meeting.

II. Publication of Symposium

1. If you plan to publish your symposium, the SICB journal (Integrative and Comparative Biology) has right of first refusal to publish SICB symposia (Hal Heatwhole is the editor and may be contacted at <harold_heatwole at ncsu.edu> -- replace "at" with "@"). The page charges for publication in Integrative and Comparative Biology ($135/page) are voluntary for the first 12 pages and are mandatory for any additional pages beyond those first 12 pages (per published paper).

2. If it is decided that the proceedings are to be submitted elsewhere, it is imperative that the organizers seek pages charges or other publication costs in the grant proposal that is submitted to support the symposium. The costs for publication should be considered up front and funds should be requested when submitted in a grant proposal. The costs of publications can be quite high and in some cases in the past, unexpected.

III. Funding

If you have been approved for a symposium, please note: some of you have received commitments from your Divisions for financial support of your symposium and some of you have not. Some of you need additional funding and some do not. Unless your symposium needs no money, a way of obtaining additional funding is to submit a proposal for support of your symposium to the appropriate Program of the National Science Foundation, or to another appropriate funding body. One way we have of rewarding those who submit such a proposal is that we will provide reimbursed registration to a SICB meeting for ALL of your symposium participants, EVEN IF THE PROPOSAL IS UNSUCCESSFUL. [This support is ordinarily not provided to those symposia that do not submit proposals for extramural funding.] For helpful advice about applying for external funding, please go to the appropriate link on the SICB website.