Preparations for IPC 2025 have started!
Preparations for the 30th International Population Conference to be held in Brisbane, Australia from 13 to 18 July 2025 began officially with the first virtual meeting of the International Organizing Committee (IOC) on 9-10 February 2023. During this meeting, which included members of the Australian National Organizing Committee, the IUSSP Council, and ex-officio members from the UN Population Division, the IOC was officially constituted with Ann Evans (Australian National University) elected as the Chair of the IOC and Shireen Jejeebhoy, IUSSP President, as its Vice Chair. The Australian National Organizing Committee reported on their partners, fundraising efforts and plans for the event in Brisbane. IUSSP provided an overview of the structure, organization, and timetable for the scientific programme.
All were excited at the prospect of hosting the IUSSP conference in Brisbane, Australia. While it will be far for many to travel to, we all realized it will have been 8 years since the last in-person IPC took place in Cape Town, South Africa. We hope and expect that many IUSSP members will find a way to attend the event and that IPC 2025 will introduce a new generation of population researchers to our community. To this end we work to maximize active participation through oral and poster presentations and an exciting pre-conference programme before the event, making the trip to Australia worth every while! Together with our Australian hosts, we are working on ways to mitigate the carbon footprint of the conference, through a variety of initiatives, and are eagerly looking forward to welcoming IUSSP members and the population community at large to Australia.
The IOC approved a preliminary list of themes and session topics to be included in the Call for Papers and made several more key decisions on the Conference.
IPC 2025 will be an in-person conference. Given the location of the conference in Australia it would be very difficult to offer adequate time slots for members across the globe to join the conference virtually and too costly to justify a hybrid platform. The IOC hopes however to be able to offer some livestreaming of plenary and possibly some key sessions, but we regret that it will not be possible for speakers to present virtually in the regular sessions.
To reduce costs and for practical reasons, the working language for IPC 2025 will be English. The IOC is not able to provide simultaneous interpretation for regular sessions but would highly welcome any donor funding to cover interpretation costs for sessions. Conference communication such as the Call for papers and the IPC 2025 website will also be in English only. Those planning to submit an abstract to the Call for Papers should plan to prepare their submission in English. Presenters who are not comfortable speaking in English can present in another language but should prepare their PowerPoint, especially graphs and tables, in English so that the audience can follow the key points.
Conference Structure
IPC 2025 will have approximately 240 session slots organized into 12 concurrent session streams, with 5 mid-day poster sessions and 6 evening plenary sessions. Some 200-220 sessions will be created from papers submitted in response to the Call for Papers; another 20 to 40 sessions will be reserved for sponsored Research Leader and invited sessions.
Regular oral sessions will be 90 minutes in duration including 4 or 5 papers, to allow as many presentations as possible. Discussants will be optional; session chairs will initiate and moderate discussion. To further increase the number of oral presentations, a series of Flash sessions will be organized with 7-8 short presentations. Poster sessions will include up to 200 poster presentations each. We realize that participants often need a presentation to get funding to attend the conference; at IPC 2025 we expect to have room for over 2000 oral or poster presentations! In addition to the regular programme there will be side meetings and exhibits during the conference. The Australian NOC is also developing an attractive programme of pre-conference training courses to take place at the University of Queensland the week before the Conference.
Call for Papers
The Call for Papers will be launched in September/October 2023 with the deadline to submit an abstract set for 15 September 2024 allowing plenty of time to prepare a submission.
The Call for papers will include 24 broad Themes to which participants can directly submit their papers. In addition, there will be some 80 more specific member-proposed and IOC proposed session topics where abstracts can be submitted as well.
As we want your best work and do not want to overburden our Theme conveners, Session organizers and Reviewers, only one submission as presenting author will be allowed at IPC 2025; participants may co-author other submissions. Abstracts should be submitted to either a theme topic or a session topic! All submissions will be reviewed by 2 anonymous reviewers before they are considered for inclusion in a session by a Session organizer or a Theme convener. Papers submitted directly to a session topic that are not included in a session will also be considered by the Theme convener for inclusion in one of the theme sessions.
A draft list of Themes is to be found at the end of this article. The Secretariat is currently inviting Theme conveners and Session organizers. Invitations will also be going out to IUSSP members to serve as reviewers offering plenty of opportunities to be involved in developing the scientific programme for IPC 2025
To allow as many colleagues as possible to present their work at IPC 2025, only one appearance as presenting author of a paper or a poster in the regular program will be allowed. A presenter can however also serve as a session chair or discussant. Co-author roles will not be counted towards the one appearance rule, nor will roles as an invited speaker in a Research Leader or invited session (including a Plenary).
The presenting author must register for the conference and pay the registration fee to hold the paper on the programme. An individual registration fee can cover only one oral or poster presentation. Conference Registration fee rates will be announced in the coming months. These rates will of course be set at a level that greatly favors IUSSP members and especially those colleagues who maintain their IUSSP membership between IPCs. It pays to keep your membership active!
Tentative list of Themes
Key Dates
1 October 2023 - Call for Papers announcement
*For information on all the other reasons for participants and their guests to visit Brisbane and its surroundings (including the Great Barrier Reef!), please read the previous article on the IUSSP's site visit to Brisbane. |