On behalf of the Organizing Committee, we would like to announce that the 12th Workshop on Accelerators Operation will be held virtually from October 5th to Oct 8th, 2021, organized by the ALBA Synchrotron (Barcelona, Spain). The workshop was planned for 2020 in the city of Barcelona but, unfortunately, due to the present situation of the COVID-19 pandemic in the globe, with many countries still deeply affected by the pandemic, the Organising Committee has taken the difficult decision to switch to an online event.

For this special WAO we would like to mainly focus on how the Operation of the Accelerators has been affected by the pandemic. We want to know, how and what, was the first reaction of your laboratory to the incoming pandemic, and what are you doing now to ensure safe operation while keeping your key performance indicators. We would also like to discuss which, of the new policies or technological upgrades implemented during the last months, are we likely to keep once the pandemic is over. The WAO 2021 program will include contributed talks, as well as poster sessions and parallel discussions.

The fact that our Accelerators serve different purposes and different communities will bring new points of view into the discussion resulting in a very fruitful exchange of information for each one of us.

The International Program Committee’s preliminary workshop agenda is now published online: www.wao2021.com.

Registration and Call for Abstracts opened on April 20th 2021.