RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Evaluating features of scientific conferences: A call for improvements
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2020.04.02.022079
DO 10.1101/2020.04.02.022079
A1 Sarvenaz Sarabipour
A1 Aziz Khan
A1 Samantha Seah
A1 Aneth D. Mwakilili
A1 Fiona N. Mumoki
A1 Pablo J. Sáez
A1 Benjamin Schwessinger
A1 Humberto J. Debat
A1 Tomislav Mestrovic
YR 2021
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/01/17/2020.04.02.022079.abstract
AB Scientific conferences provide valuable opportunities for researchers across career stages and disciplines to present their latest work, and to network with their peers. These meetings have largely been held in-person with rapid proliferation in the number of meetings and attendees. Yet the format and quality of their organization lag behind what is possible and as a result, the current experience of attending conferences in many disciplines remains unchanged in many respects. We created a database of 270 national and international academic conferences held in-person during 2018-2019 in various disciplines and examined them for their features, costs and impact on the community. We found that many meetings could still be improved significantly in terms of diversity, inclusivity, promoting early career researcher (ECR) networking and career development, venue accessibility, and importantly, reducing the meetings’ carbon footprint. It is important to accelerate and mandate efforts to improve conferences so that researchers in all disciplines, in particular ECRs, consistently benefit from scientific gatherings, for years to come. We discuss a combination of approaches and recommendations to make conferences more modern, effective, equitable and intellectually productive for the research community and environmentally sustainable for our planet.“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.”Andy WarholCompeting Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.