The Roll5 Conference, scheduled to take place in April 2012 in the UK, has been postponed. The decision to postpone the event was reluctantly taken by the organising committee together with the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining, and reflects the severe economic climate affecting the global metals rolling industry. We concluded that the likely attendance would not be sufficient to reward the presenting authors' efforts, and indeed many of the presenters themselves have in recent weeks told us of uncertainty about their permission to travel to the event.

The organisers and sponsors remain committed to re-schedule the Roll5 event with its original scale and scope as soon as we have a consensus that the market is ready. We have been very pleased with the quantity and quality of the papers offered, as well as with the high level of interest in sponsoring and exhibiting. The international breadth of support that this conference series continues to enjoy has been encouraging and we are frustrated that such a high quality programme cannot be effectively delivered at this time.

We have therefore resolved to stage a number of interim events, the form of which will be developed with help from our rolling community.

Our early thoughts regarding an interim event are:

Smaller, focused workshop

Single-day format in an accessible venue

One or two technical themes (subset of full Roll5 scope)

Subset of papers offered for Roll5 to be presented, subject to the agreement of authors, and supplemented by invited papers

Extended abstracts published

First interim event in November 2012 in London (IoM3's Carlton House Terrace)

Organising committee reviews economic position at time of interim event, and will decide on the form of a further event to take place six months later. If the economic climate has improved sufficiently, this will trigger Roll5 planning. If not, there will be another small-scale interim meeting.

A second small-scale meeting would desirably have a European mainland venue. We are very keen to maintain the international character of our Rolls Conference activity and not to lose the engagement of a strong global community. We are keen to receive ideas that will support and reward international participation - for example one idea (if we can attract sponsors to help us deliver it) would be to film presentations and make them available on-line

The organising committee will remain active until we can deliver Roll5 as planned. Until then I would like to express our thanks to everyone who has supported the programme to date and to invite you please to let us know what you think about our plan and the form of the interim activity on our online comments log (it should take no more than a couple of minutes to complete and will be a great help for us in developing our plans).

Despite the postponement, we are determined to support the rolls technical community in the best way possible and we look forward to updating you of our interim solution very soon.