The Executive Committee of IACMR has been following closely the COVID-19 developments around the world. It has become clear that international travel will remain highly restricted in the coming months, as people across the globe struggle to control the virus. We recognize that your top priority now is to ensure the health of your families and communities, and to help your students manage the ripple effect of the crisis. After soliciting and listening to member concerns and suggestions, we have decided to push back the date of our biennial conference by one year, from June 2020 to June 2021. 

All papers, symposia, PDWs, and panels that were accepted for the 2020 conference are automatically accepted for the 2021 conference. You will be asked in due course to confirm whether you want your paper to be in the 2021 conference. You may submit your accepted papers to other conferences during this year delay, but if you do so please let us know; we expect that by presenting elsewhere you will have received feedback that leads to improvements in the paper, which can be incorporated into your IACMR presentation.  We will also reopen the conference submission site for a second round of paper submissions later this year. Information and key dates for this submission period will be provided later.

We have also delayed the deadline for the special session on the impact of the coronavirus on management, organized by Wu Liu and Zhaoli Song. It was initially set for March 31, 2020. You will hear more about this later from Wu and Zhaoli.

We anticipate that the conference will be held on a similar date (late June, 2021), and we hope that we can use the same conference center in Xi’an.  But it will take some time to finalize those plans.

We are also considering having a workshop in October for young scholars who feel a need to present their accepted papers more quickly. This would be for Ph.D. students, and early career junior faculty. We will do further assessment to determine if this option is feasible and desirable.

For those of you who already paid your registration fee, your payment will be fully refunded by April 5.  If you would like to not receive a refund, and just use that payment for 2021 registration, please inform our staff in Beijing at  iacmrbj@pku.edu.cn by March 25.

It is sad to know that we will not be gathering in a few months to hear great research and teaching ideas, or to meet new and old IACMR friends.  But those ideas and those friends will be there – one year later. We know that this is a difficult time for many of you, and hope that this decision at least gives you the ability to plan your lives.  Note that this is just a pause in our plans. The conference will be back, better than ever, next year.  Stay healthy.

Ray Friedman
President of IACMR

Runtian Jing
Program Chair, IACMR 2020 Conference.