Comminution '21 goes virtual, with an extended call for abstracts

I am sure that it will be of little surprise to hear that proceeding with Comminution ’21 as a face to face meeting in Cape Town is no longer viable due to the ongoing pandemic. Despite the great news on vaccines, international travel restrictions will likely continue for some time.

This, the 12th International Comminution Symposium, will now become MEI's first virtual conference, to be held over the same dates, April 19-22, 2021. We are also planning provisionally to hold a face to face conference, Comminution '22, from 25-28 April of the following year, assuming that we are back to some degree of normality.

The conference will be held via the EventsAIR platform, a highly professional and experienced online event platform, which has been adopted by the AusIMM for all its eight conferences in 2021. The AusIMM has said that they have already had a glimpse into the future with their recent digital conferences with high levels of engagement through the EventsAIR platform.

If you would like to present your work at the online event, the deadline for abstracts has now been extended to January 31st and you will soon be able to submit your abstract via the new website which will soon be launched.

Presentations will be timetabled and streamed, either 'live' from your own office, or as pre-recorded presentations. Live presentations will be recorded and all presentations will be available on demand for a period of 6 months after the conference.

In organising the timetable we will endeavour to take into account time zones so that presentations are, where possible, at convenient times for presenters within the BST (British Summer Time) timetable. 

Registering for the conference will give access to the presentations and abstracts, the virtual exhibition and the networking lounge.

After the conference, all authors will be invited to submit final papers for peer-review, and those accepted will be published in regular issues of Minerals Engineering, the world’s leading mineral processing journal, and compiled into a dedicated virtual special issue (VSI) of the Elsevier journal on ScienceDirect. As the conference itself provides initial peer-review via discussion, submission to the VSI has the advantage of reduction in time between submission and final acceptance. In 2017 the rejection rate of VSI submissions was 53% compared with 82% for non-VSI papers.

We would like to take this opportunity of thanking once again our sponsors, who have supported us throughout these difficult times.

#Comminution21