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

Face-to-face interactions at conferences are important in generating new ideas, networks and collaborations. These interactions can be facilitated via digital conferencing that has made online face-to-face contact possible ( Figure 5 ) (52) (53) (54) (55) (56) 148, 153) . Reducing academic air travel does not impact professional success (57) and holding connected meetings across major continental centers around the world is feasible using online streaming and chat technologies which create more space for researchers to interact and connect. Multi-location conferences where participants only travel to a nearby location (online conference hub) and get to interact with other "local" scientists are also viable (58, 59) . These semi-virtual conferences can be distributed across locations on multiple continents. Each hub may hold its own in-person keynote and panel sessions, but the hubs can also be connected with each other for virtual panel sessions and discussions; this enables speakers to make remote presentations and . 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 It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the .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 allows participants to upload electronic versions of posters. At the same time, the attendees' experience was clearly positive, showing that the multiple-site format can serve as an alternative to the traditional one-site format of holding national and international conferences (60) . Live streaming provides many benefits including attendee chat amongst other online attendees in real time, access to sessions that work for attendee schedules, and the ability to stream sessions from any devices while on the go. The number of conferences that are streamed digitally or held in a virtual reality setting are limited -only 8% (18/270) of the conferences that we analysed provided digital talks, recorded talks or electronic posters -but these have increased over the past few years ( Figure 5 ) (53, 55, 58, (61) (62) (63) (64) (65) (66) (67) 148, 149, 153) , and many more are urgently needed in all disciplines. In the end, reducing one's physical conference attendance might make the remaining conferences more impactful and rewarding. A flow-on effect from making conferences virtually accessible, is that this will increase reach and access globally especially to researchers in disadvantaged economies. Currently, speakers spend time and resources preparing talks which end up reaching a limited audience with limited geographic impact that is often restricted to wealthy economies.