SCAR Operations and the COVID-19 Situation – March 2020 Briefing Note 2

Thursday, March 12th, 2020

A message from SCAR President Steven L. Chown:

Dear Colleagues

In the past few days, the SCAR Directors and Secretariat have received many queries about our activities and about the forthcoming SCAR Open Science Conference and Delegates meeting to be held in Hobart, Australia later this year.

Yesterday, the SCAR Executive Committee (Vice-Presidents, Executive Director and myself) met to discuss the situation. We will circulate the outcomes of that meeting as early as we can next week to the SCAR Delegates and to the community.

We appreciate that in the context of the Hobart meeting, many of you need to reach decisions sooner rather than later. In this regard, we are in close discussion with the Local Organisers of the Hobart meeting and are working to make available a set of guidelines and timings as soon as we can. In the meantime, we are now proceeding with a consideration of Abstracts in keeping with our usual OSC-related procedures.

On behalf of the SCAR Directors, I would like to make it clear that we understand that this is a troubling time, and that lack of clarity is bound to make matters more complicated. We are doing everything we can to resolve matters as swiftly as feasible and make available the SCAR-related information you need for your decisions.

I trust that you will bear with us as we navigate these complexities. At the heart of our decisions is the principle of seeing to the continued business of SCAR, while at the same time doing everything within our means to look after the wellbeing of our community.

Once again, we note that SCAR community members should heed the advice of their national governments, states and institutions as relevant.

Should you have any matters that you need specific clarification about, please do feel free to mail either myself or Chandrika Nath, bearing in mind that advice about the SCAR-COMNAP 2020 meeting has not changed from my previous briefing note.

Steven L Chown
SCAR President

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