Terms & Conditions
A. Registration Process and Payment Methods
Registrants’ fee will be calculated according to the registration date, country of origin and age, following the rates in the information table. Your data will be verified at the moment of receiving your congress materials in Sofia, where every participant will have to show ID. The payment of on-site registration must be made using a credit card or cash, in Euro or the local currency - BGN - Bulgarian Lev. Fee differences between the announced data in the registration form and the ID data will be settled according to on-site tariffs and paid in the same way.
IASS/IAS membership fee must be paid by all participants who present a paper at the congress. The membership makes eligibility to participate in the General assembly (17th September) and to be elected as a National Representative of your country, as well as to have your paper published in the congress proceedings (after success at peer review).
Congress registrations will not be confirmed until the correct payment is received and processed by the Registration Office. Exceptions will be made for registrants from Africa, Argentina and Venezuela, who will be allowed to make an on-site payment with the fee according to the submission date of the online registration.
Registrants will receive two e-mails of confirmation – one concerning the successful registration in the Semio2014 congress database and one concerning the successful payment of the participation fee. Only the second e-mail will serve as a confirmation of the registration for participation in the congress. Semio2014 cannot be responsible for your spam filters blocking your confirmation e-mails. Please be sure your spam filters will allow mail from semio2014.org and the congress coordinator.
You can to do the payment also via bank transfer using IBAN:
In favor of: NEW BULGARIAN UNIVERSITY
IBAN: BG36RZBB91554460052925
BIC: RZBBBGSF
Bank name: Raiffeisenbank
Branch address: 5A, Nikola Petkov blv., 1619 Sofia, Bulgaria
If you need an invoice for individual or group payment please contact us on info@semio2014.org
Students (including PhD students) qualify for a lower fee even if aged 30 or over. Students should contact the organizer (info@semio2014.org) and provide evidence for their enrolment as students.
Accommodation costs are not included in the congress registration fee. Attendees are responsible for making their own lodging arrangements, but we shall recommend hotels and hostels which offer special rates for Semio2014 participants (see updated information here).
B. Cancellation Policy
Congress registration can be cancelled only by writing an e-mail request (from the same e-mail address of the registration) to the organizing team (info@semio2014.org) with the subject “Cancellation”.
Congress registrations cancelled on or before June 30th will be entitled to a full refund, with transfer fees deducted (about 4-5% if made through PayPal).
Congress registrations cancelled on or before August 15th will be entitled to a 50% refund.
Registrations cancelled after August 15th will not be entitled to a refund.
Substitutions of a participant may be made at any time by a registered participant. If a registered participant wishes to cancel his own participation and use it for another participant, please contact the Congress Registration Office at the earliest opportunity. If the tariff for the new participant is higher than that for the initial one, difference in payment will be settled in Sofia at the registration desk.
All refunds will be made after the Congress and within two weeks.
C. Congress program and social activities (only this part of the “Terms and Conditions” will be subject to update)
The congress program will be a work in progress until the end of August 2014, but we shall publish and update it all the time. Information about current proposals for topics, round tables and study sessions, as well as the deadlines can be found here.
We plan to have three world famous guest speakers, key figures in the field of innovation, for the tradition of humanities and someone best representing the region in global culture. We are still negotiating, but there will be an update soon. The talks of those guest speakers will take place on Monday, 16th of September, before noon, after the opening ceremony, on 17th from 9 to 10 a.m. and on 18th from 9 to 10 a.m., all in “Bulgaria Hall” in the center of Sofia. After these key lectures, transport will be organized from “Bulgaria Hall” to New Bulgarian University, where the academic part of the congress will take place.
We do not plan to have plenary lectures in the conventional way because the number of scholars we would like to distinguish exceeds the limits of our working schedule. Instead, we plan to dedicate a series of lectures in the main Aula of the New Bulgarian University under the title “Semiotics and its Masters”, where all leading semioticians will be invited to present a relevant part of their work in 45 minutes each. The collection of these lectures will be published with the same title by a prestigious international editor.
The social program contains:
1) A welcoming party on the evening of the 16th (Tuesday), open to registered participants, the price is included in the fee.
2) General Assembly of IASS/AIS on the evening of the 17th (Wednesday), in Bulgaria Hall
3) A Bulgarian Culinary Show on the evening of the 18th (Thursday), something not to miss, with a limited number of places, 35 Euro (50 $) if paid in advance with the online registration and 50 Euro (70 $) if places are available, if you pay in Sofia.
4) Official closing gala dinner on the evening of the 19th, an event of quality and elegance, 35 Euro (50 $) if paid in advance with the online registration and 50 Euro (70 $) if you pay in Sofia.
5) A Football match: Latin America and Spain VS the Rest of the World, played in the NBU campus, probably on the afternoon of the 20th. For playing in the former team contact José María Paz Gago (pazgagochema@gmail.com) and for playing in the latter contact Kristian Bankov (kbankov@nbu.bg).
6) On Sunday 21st September, there will be a variety of tourism activities, still to be defined.
D. Personal Information
Please note that participant contact details will be kept on the Semio2014 congress database, which will only be used by Semio2014.
Unless the Registration Office has received an explicit request from a registrant requesting that we do not share his/her contact information (through the Registration Form), a list of all attendees, their affiliation institutions and e-mail addresses will be included in the Participant packs.
The e-mail addresses will also be used to circulate last minute details and announcements.
If you would like your record to be deleted after the congress, please notify Semio2014 by email (info@semio2014.org).