Evaluating features of scientific conferences: A call for improvements

Sarvenaz Sarabipour; Benjamin Schwessinger; Fiona N. Mumoki; Aneth D. Mwakilili; Aziz Khan; Humberto J. Debat; Pablo J. Sáez; Samantha Seah; Tomislav Mestrovic

It is crucial for organizers of virtual conferences to develop strategies for facilitating digital connections. Fully streaming conferences (beyond video-conferencing select talks) can be made feasible without many significant additional resources, and can also be accompanied by online (e.g. Slack) discussions and successful Twitter (poster) conferences (68) (69) (70) (71) . Participants can also record and upload videos of their presentations that are posted to the conference website. During a several-week period when the conference is "open", attendees can watch the videos, ask questions, and interact with the speakers in online forums; graduate and postdoctoral positions can also be offered and applied for. iBiology (a project creating open-access science videos on biology research and science-related topics) has provided virtual talks and lectures for a number of years (72, 73) . The North American Vascular Biology Organization (NAVBO) holds a number of yearlong webinars, online journal clubs and online . CC-BY 4.0 International license author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.02.022079 doi: bioRxiv preprint mini-symposia (74) . A number of Slack groups have taken the initiative to connect researchers in life sciences related disciplines globally via group based and one-on-one online meetings and discussions (75) . Conference attendees can form groups on Slack or similar platforms, hold their meetings online and keep connected virtually afterwards. Electronic (online) poster sessions can provide each presenter with the opportunity to tag their poster with a 3-5 minute talk summarising their work. Submitting video presentations of talks and posters which attendees could watch (76) followed by a 'direct message' to the authors/presenters for inquiries can be made feasible via an online platform. Scientific electronic panels can be held via platforms such as Virtual Keynote Symposia (VKS), Zoom, Crowdcast, Vimeo livestream, OBS, ON24, Meet by Google, GoToWebinar and GoToMeeting, allowing both video conferencing and the opportunity to break into "breakout rooms" accommodating one-on-one and small discussion groups (e.g. via Slack or Discourse) (18, 19, 23, 57, 77, 78, 153) . These platforms and others are being utilized for scientific chats on a daily and weekly basis where ideas are exchanged and collaborations are shaped among researchers (79,80). IEEE association offers tools such as WebEx (with recording option), Google Hangouts (no recording option), INXPO, and YouTube for online meetings and recordings and tools such as Camtasia, QuickTime and WebEx Recorder for offline recordings. A number of recent conferences to be held in-person in 2020, which were cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, launched their meetings online using free Open Science Framework (OSF) Meetings instance to facilitate virtual dissemination of presentations and posters by their members and attendees (81). Digital conferences and discussion forums can, in fact, serve to assist communication between early career and senior researchers since writing a comment or question in a forum can feel less intimidating than approaching an established scholar in person. With more time to think the presentations through, attendees can put their best foot forward during interactions and networking with speakers.