The selection board is where the committee turns scores into a program. Decisions made here are staged — recorded, revisable, and completely invisible to submitters until you choose to send them.
The board is grouped by track
Abstracts are presented track by track and ranked within each track, highest normalized score first, unscored items last. There is no single all-tracks league table, and this is deliberate: when tracks can use different scoring questionnaires, a 78% in one track and a 78% in another are not the same quantity.
Each track shows your acceptance count against the capacity targets you set, so you can see when a track is full without being prevented from going over.
What the board flags for you
- Split votes — where completed reviews reach no majority recommendation. These are the ones that need a human conversation, and they are marked so you can find them without reading everything.
- Undecided — nothing staged yet.
- Coverage — abstracts still short of their reviewer target.
- Every statistic across the top doubles as a filter: click "Waitlist" to see only waitlisted items, click it again to clear.
The decisions
Which options a row offers depends on what was submitted. An individual abstract can be accepted as an oral, a poster or a paper on demand; a session proposal is accepted as a session, because its format is the chair's proposition rather than the committee's choice. The rest apply to both.
Accept-top-N applies a single decision to a whole group, and a decision that does not fit one of the rows will be refused — for the entire batch, not just the row that failed. On a track containing both individual abstracts and session proposals, filter to one shape before deciding in bulk.
Rescuing a talk from a rejected proposal
A session proposal is judged as a unit, but committees frequently want one talk out of a session they are otherwise declining. Where a proposal is staged as rejected or waitlisted, each talk carries an Extract to pool action that lifts it out as a new individual abstract — its title, its abstract text, and its full author list intact — landing in the general pool as submitted and undecided, to be judged like any other.
This is deliberately a salvage path: an accepted proposal cannot be split, and each talk can only be extracted once.
Deciding in bulk
Per track, you can accept the top N — set a number, see exactly which abstracts that will affect in a live preview, and be warned if it would overwrite decisions already staged. The bulk action always operates on the whole track group as ranked, not on whatever filter you happen to be looking at, so a filtered view cannot mislead you into deciding the wrong set.
Staged decisions are staff-only. Rostrum actively strips them out of everything a submitter can see — their dashboard, their notifications, their own abstract record. A submitter looking at their screen while you deliberate sees only "Submitted".
Nothing reaches them until you run a notification batch, which is the next chapter.
The abstract book
From the same screen you can export an abstract book — the proceedings document societies print, publish or circulate to delegates. It comes as a typeset PDF with a cover, a contents page, one section per group, and an index of presenting authors; or as a spreadsheet if you would rather work with the data.
You choose whether to include everything accepted or only those who have confirmed, whether to group by track or by presentation type, and whether to print keywords, session and board placement, and author disclosures.
The book reflects the decisions currently staged, which means a book exported mid-selection can contain acceptances the submitters have not been told about yet. Rostrum detects this and marks the PDF — a red cover line, a DRAFT watermark across every page, and _DRAFT in the filename.
The spreadsheet formats carry no such watermark — only the filename suffix. Treat an exported spreadsheet as confidential until every decision has actually been sent.
The export covers abstracts accepted as orals or posters. Session proposals and their talks are outside its scope — if your call ran proposals, give the book a read before publishing and add any proposal content through your own front matter.