On-line submission of abstracts to the Australian Physiological Society

D.F. Davey, Department of Physiology, University of Sydney, NSW 2006 Australia and (postal address) D'Entrecasteaux, 378 Manuka Road, Kettering, Tasmania 7155 Australia.

Abstracts must be submitted through the Society's web site. Access to the submission process will be controlled by a username and password, which every member should have.

Title and by-line. The server will solicit the title and the name(s) of the author(s), the institutional address(es), which addresses apply to which authors where there is more than one, whether each author is a member of AuPS or any other society involved in a joint meeting. Where no author is a member, the introducing member will be sought. This information will be used to format the title and by-line in a consistent fashion, and will also be entered into a database used to organise the meeting programme, publish that programme, and create indexes. To assist in the indexing, authors should ensure that their name appears in the same form on every abstract they co-author, i.e. initials and surname.

Body. The simplest way to provide the body of the abstract will be to cut and paste the text from another window into the browser in contact with the server. This method will probably not preserve super- or sub-scripting, so some authors will want to upload the body of their abstract from a file on their computer. The style required is described in Dinudom (2007).

File format. Abstracts in the on-line Proceedings will appear in HTML (Hyper-Text Markup Language), and PDF (Portable Document Format) for printing. Single pages, whole symposia and sessions, and the entire meeting in PDF format will be available for download.

Because HTML is the primary form of publication, abstract files in HTML will be prefered, but other portable formats including plain text if there are no special formatting requirments, and RTF (Rich Text Format) will be accepted. It will not be possible for the server to convert proprietary word processor formats such as those created by MSWord or WordPerfect, so authors creating the text of their abstracts with such software should save the text as an RTF file and upload that.

Figure. Only one figure (line drawing or half tone) is permitted. Its position in the text file should be indicated thus:

[ Figure here ]
The figure must be uploaded as a separate file, not embedded in a text file. A figure created with graphical applications should be uploaded in PostScript or PDF format. Images (micrographs, gel scans etc.) should be uploaded in a standard image file format. If in doubt do both.

Special characters. Most special characters such as letters with diacrits, Greek characters, mathematical symbols and punctuation can be represented in HTML and displayed by current browsers. Symbols requiring one character overstruck with another can only be managed by specialist browsers supporting the "Math" extension. Characters such as a "V-dot" present a problem. They should be represented in the text in the form &V-dot;, and described in the "for the editor only" section. These characters can be included as images, e.g. V-dot .

For the editor only. Include this section when special characters are used (See Davey, 2005 and above) and/or if any requests for particular handling are needed (e.g. the size of a figure). This section will not appear in the Proceedings.

Dinudom A. (2007) Preparation of abstracts of communications and demonstrations to the Australian Physiological Society http://www.AuPS.org.au/Proceedings/preparation.html