Evaluating features of scientific conferences: A call for improvements

Abstract

Scientific conferences provide valuable opportunities for researchers across career stages and disciplines to present their latest work and to network with their peers. The advent of the internet has opened new possibilities for interaction, collaboration and networking, yet the uptake of tools enabling remote participation at scientific meetings has been slow. Academic conferences have become more international with high proliferation in the number of meetings and attendees, but the format and quality of their organization lags behind what is possible. As a result, the experience of attending conferences in many disciplines today is not appreciably different in many respects. A few conferences in some disciplines have recently implemented valuable changes for the community and have become more receptive to attendees with families. Many meetings could still be improved significantly in terms of diversity, inclusivity, promoting early career researcher (ECR) networking and career development, venue accessibility, and more importantly, reducing the meetings' carbon footprint. These issues are openly visible and to some extent discussed among researchers on social media. It is important to accelerate and mandate these efforts so that researchers in all disciplines, in particular ECRs, consistently benefit from scientific gatherings, for years to come. We examined the current state of over 200 national and international academic meetings in various disciplines for key features of inclusivity and sustainability and propose solutions to make conferences more modern, effective, equitable and intellectually productive for the research community and environmentally sustainable for our planet.

Improving on legacy conferences by moving online

“…For example, family duties, gender bias, disabilities, travel bans, limited funding, religious practices, and many other disadvantages may limit participation in legacy conferences. An online platform can remove many of these barriers to increase the potential set of individuals who can participate (Sarabipour, 2020). In neuromatch, we included a session devoted to early-career researchers and had an equal number of men and women among the invited speakers.…”

“…We partnered with the University of Pennsylvania and Imperial College, and two journals -Neurons, Behavior, Data analysis and Theory and eLife. The collaboration with eLife allowed us to incorporate a new component for early-career researchers (eLife, 2020;Sarabipour, 2020;Weissgerber et al, 2020). The conference was free for all participants.…”

Shifting away from the business-as-usual approach to research conferences

“…The Brazilian Reef Meeting, Encontro Recifal Brasileiro – EReBra (Portuguese), held as a regionally focused component of GCRW 2020, was the first event dedicated to reef environments in Brazil. The lack of such events in the past has made the local audience seek out international events, involving long distance travel at high economic and environmental costs ( Sarabipour et al, 2020 preprint ). Traveling is the main cost associated with scientific events for attendees ( Rowe, 2019 ), especially in a large country like Brazil.…”

Virtual conferences raise standards for accessibility and interactions

“…Many researchers are unable to attend in-person conferences due to financial and logistic barriers ( Sarabipour et al, 2020 ; Figure 1 ). Virtual conferences lower or remove these barriers by reducing both costs and travel times: they also reduce the 'red tape' (e.g.…”

“…the need for visas) experienced by some researchers, and make it easier for those with disabilities or vulnerabilities and those with caring responsibilities to take part. Another advantage is that they have a much reduced carbon footprint ( Sarabipour et al, 2020 ). Virtual conferences are also significantly cheaper for scientific societies to organize ( Castelvecchi, 2020 ), allowing lower registration costs than in-person meetings.…”