Dear Colleagues and Friends,

The purpose of this newsletter is to provide clarification on two issues that some of you have been contacting us about.

Acceptance of abstracts for oral communications.
We have completed the allocation of the first c.1180 to symposia, pending some minor adjustments due to insufficient abstracts selected by some symposium organizers. Therefore, early next week we will contact all authors of accepted abstracts in this first phase.

However, in order to accommodate as many abstracts as possible, we will increase the number of concurrent session rooms from 15 to 18. Thus, in a second step, we will propose that a number of symposia have an additional session, favoring symposia with more abstracts, but also maximizing the number of oral presenters and taking into account the topic. This means that even if your oral abstract is not accepted next week (in the first phase), it may still be accepted in the second phase.
In the meantime, some of you have expressed concern about what will happen to your oral abstract if it is not accepted, and whether you should submit the same abstract but this time as a poster. Please do not submit an additional abstract with the same title and content if you only plan to present it as a poster in case it is not accepted as a talk. If an oral abstract is not accepted for a symposium, the organizing committee will invite you to present it as a poster after we finish the second stage of elaborating the full oral program.

Satellite Meetings.
On February 1^st, the date we have set as the deadline, we will begin to organize time slots and rooms for the satellite meetings, taking into account the different needs of each of them. For proposals after this date, please contact the Technical Secretariat at mdodi@fase20.com

Please do not hesitate to contact us with any questions or concerns.

Best regards,
The Organizing Committee of the XX IBC.