It is my great pleasure to invite you to the first electronic Conference on Plant Sciences. This electronic conference will be held online at sciforum.net, a platform developed and maintained by MDPI for hosting conferences. It allows scientists from all over the world to present their latest research, receive direct feedback, and engage in discussions with the wider scientific community.

In celebration of 2020, the International Year of Plant Health (declared by the United Nations), we will highlight the importance of plant science contributions to food security, global economic development and the environment. We have planned focus sessions on plant responses to biotic and abiotic stresses, plant nutrition, and plant–soil Interactions. The conference covers research at all scales, from cell biology to ecosystems, and includes bioinformatics and modelling approaches. A session on scientific communication and outreach welcomes papers for public engagement and educational resources.

There is no charge for registration, no travel, and no need to book accommodation, thus reducing costs and the concerning carbon footprint. The accepted proceedings papers will probably be published in MDPI Biology and Life Sciences Forum journal, and selected papers (need 50% extension compared with the proceedings papers) will be considered for publication in a special issue of Plants, a high visibility open access journal, with a 20% discount on the APC.

We are committed to equality and inclusion principles, thus we ask authors to ensure that the papers and presentations are highly accessible to the wider and more diverse scientific community. We encourage submissions from scientists at all career stages and from all backgrounds, and aim for equal gender balance.

We are looking forward to receiving your submissions to this new exciting event and would like to thank you in advance for your active contribution to Plant Sciences.

Sincerely,

Dr. Yoselin Benitez-Alfonso

Conference Secretariat
Mr. Andy Yi
Ms. Stefanie Li
email: iecps2020@mdpi.com

Sessions

Submission should be completed online by authors by registering with https://sciforum.net/ and using the “Start New Submission” function once logged into system.

1. Scholars interested in participating in the conference can submit their abstract (about 200–300 words describing the manuscript for Proceedings) online at this website until 10 September 2020 10 October 2020.
2. Based on the submitted abstract, the Conference Committee will conduct a pre-evaluation of whether a contribution from the authors of the abstract will be welcome for the 1st International Electronic Conference on Plant Science. All authors will be notified by 24 September 2020 20 October 2020 about the acceptance of their abstract.
3. If the abstract is accepted for this conference, the author will be invited to prepare a full description of their work (max. 8 pages), optionally accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation/poster, until the submission deadline of 20 October 2020 10 November 2020.
4. The conference proceedings papers and presentations will be available for discussion on https://iecps2020.sciforum.net/ during the time of the conference 1–15 December 2020.
5. The accepted proceedings papers will probably be published in MDPI Biology and Life Sciences Forum journal.
   Note: Before publication, Biology and Life Sciences Forum journal will review accepted papers using the powerful text comparison tool: iThenticate. This procedure aims to prevent scholarly and professional plagiarism.
   Submissions with a high repetition rate and lack of novelty will not be published in the conference proceedings.
6. The open access journal Plants will publish a conference Special Issue. After the conference, the Conference Committee will select abstracts for which extended papers may be included for publication in the Special Issue of the journal Plants (the submission to the journal is independent from the conference proceedings and will follow the usual process of the journal, including peer review and application of an APC).

Proceedings Manuscripts

Manuscripts for Proceedings must conform to the following structure:

First page:

• Title
• Full author names
• Affiliations (including full postal address) and authors’ email addresses
• Abstract (200–250 words)
• Keywords
• Introduction
• Methods
• Results and Discussion
• Conclusions
• (Acknowledgments)
• References

Manuscripts should be prepared in MS Word or any other word processor and should be converted to PDF format before submission. The publication format will be PDF. The manuscript should count at least 3 pages (incl. figures, tables, and references) .

Microsoft Word

Authors must use the Microsoft Word template to prepare their manuscript. Using the template file will substantially shorten the time to complete copy-editing and publication of accepted manuscripts. Manuscript prepared in MS Word must be converted into a single file before submission. Please do not insert any graphics (schemes, figures, etc.) into a movable frame which can superimpose the text and create difficulties related to layout.

IECPS2020-template.docx

Manuscript Preparation

• Paper Format: A4 paper format, the printing area is 17.5 cm × 26.2 cm. The margins should be 1.75 cm on each side of the paper (top, bottom, and left and right sides).
• Formatting/Style: Papers should be prepared following the style of the IECPS2020 template. The full titles and cited papers must be given. Reference numbers should be placed in square brackets [ ], and placed before the punctuation; for example, [4] or [1–3], and all the references should be listed separately as the last section at the end of the manuscript.
• Author List and Affiliation Format: Authors’ full first and last names must be given. Any abbreviated middle names can be added. For papers written by various contributors, a corresponding author must be designated. The PubMed/MEDLINE format is used for affiliations: complete street address information including city, zip code, state/province, country, and email address should be added. All authors who contributed significantly to the manuscript (including writing a section) should be listed on the first page of the manuscript, below the title of the article. Other parties, who provided only minor contributions, should only be listed under Acknowledgments. A minor contribution might be a discussion with the author, reading through the draft of the manuscript, or performing English corrections.
• Figures, Schemes, and Tables: Authors are encouraged to prepare figures and schemes in color. Full color graphics will be published free of charge. Figure and schemes must be numbered (Figure 1, Scheme I, Figure 2, Scheme II, etc.) and an explanatory title must be added. Tables should be inserted into the main text with numbers and titles supplied for all tables. All table columns should have an explanatory heading. Please supply legends for all figures, schemes, and tables. The legends should be prepared as a separate paragraph of the main text and placed in the main text before a table, figure, or scheme.

Presentation Slides

Authors are encouraged to prepare a presentation in PowerPoint or similar software, to be displayed online along with the manuscript. Slides, if available, will be directly displayed on the website using Sciforum.net’s proprietary slides viewer. Slides can be prepared in exactly the same way as for any traditional conference where research results can be presented. Slides should be converted to the PDF format before submission so that our process can easily and automatically convert them for online displaying.

IECPS2020-PPT-template.pptx

Video Presentations

Authors are also encouraged to submit video presentations. Videos can be presented without an accompanying Proceedings paper and will be available online on this website during and after the e-conference. However, they will not be added to the proceedings of the conference. The video should be no longer than 20 minutes and be prepared with the following formats:

• MOV
• MPEG4
• MP4
• AVI
• WMV
• MPEGPS
• FLV

The video should be submitted via email before 10 November 2020.

Presentation of Posters

Posters will be available on this conference website during and after the event. As with papers presented at conferences, participants will be able to ask questions and make comments about the posters. Posters can be presented without an accompanying Proceedings paper and will be available online on this website during and after the e-conference. However, they will not be added to the proceedings of the conference.

Potential Conflicts of Interest

It is the authors’ responsibility to identify and declare any personal circumstances or interests that may be perceived as inappropriately influencing the representation or interpretation of clinical research. If there are no conflicts, please state here “The authors declare no conflicts of interest”. This should be conveyed in a separate “Conflicts of Interest” statement preceding the “Acknowledgments” and “References” sections at the end of the manuscript. Financial support for the study must be fully disclosed under the “Acknowledgments” section.

Copyright

MDPI, the publisher of the Sciforum.net platform, is an open access publisher. We believe that authors should retain the copyright to their scholarly works. Hence, by submitting a communications paper to this conference, you retain the copyright of your paper, but you grant MDPI the non-exclusive right to publish this paper online on the Sciforum.net platform. This means you can easily submit your paper to any scientific journal at a later stage and transfer the copyright to its publisher (if required by that publisher).