Scientific conferencing in 2020: we needed changes, and we’ve got them.
Despite the astonishing changes Internet brought to our daily life and professional workflows, the way scientists participate in the conferences remained largely unchanged over the past 100 years: they book a hotel and travel to the venue. There is one premise: you should be able to travel. This became a problem that impacts individuals, communities, scientific diversity, and even the climate.
Excluded
There are many who cannot afford overseas travel and thus are silently excluded:
By family situation: expecting and nursing parents, especially single. This often means a shutdown in conferencing for months or years. Although many conference organizers strive to provide on-site support for parents, the travel itself can be stressful, expensive and time-consuming. Especially if you fall into several exclusion categories at the same time.
By income: many young aspiring scientists from low-income countries dream of traveling to a US/EU conference, but have no funds to do so. My first foreign conference trip in 2005 from Novosibirsk, Russia to Tallahassee, Florida was like flying to the Moon, and became possible only thanks to conference organizers who generously agreed to cover the costs. I borrowed from friends and family to buy the tickets and pay the motel. When I finally received the reimbursement check three months later, no bank clerk in Novosibirsk knew how to cash it. Scientists in EU/US are blissfully ignorant how hard is to raise conference money for an outsider.
By citizenship: people from countries which are foes with US for political reasons. Some of my Iranian colleagues experienced a complete travel ban to US in 2019. My non-EU colleagues and myself shiver when it’s time to get a new US visa. My colleague from Pakistan spends several hours in a special “interview” room every time he enters US.
Citizens of 156 countries need a visa for entering US, and 107 countries need visa for Schengen. Applying for these visas, traveling to consulates for interview and finger-printing is stressful and humiliating.
By health: eating fast food at the airport, standing in long lines, and spending multiple hours in a cramped seat can be difficult even for a young and healthy person. People who have health conditions, dietary restrictions, or mobility issues must put titanic efforts to attend a conference.
Conferences are therefore optimized for those who are young, preferably male, white, EU/US passport, healthy, well-off, and willing to travel.
Carbon
The carbon footprint of a transatlantic flight per person, economy class, is roughly 1 ton CO2 each way (e.g. Frankfurt — New York). You can calculate the footprint of your specific trip using one of the calculators (eg by The Guardian). One can argue that flying is not the largest source of emissions, but I personally feel that making 2 tons of CO2 for giving a talk is too much.
What can we do about it?
It is long overdue to rethink how the conferences are organized, and add some options for those who prefer to attend remotely. We have all the technology we need, it’s just a question of willingness to do the change.
I recently attended virtually the Software for Microscopy Workshop at Janelia, and it was a paradigm-shifting experience for me and others. Out of about 30 attendees, five connected remotely to the seminar room in Ashburn, VA, and worked across 9 time zones (from San Francisco, Zurich and Berlin). We used Zoom platform and could seamlessly listen talks, ask questions, show our slides and even participate in brainstorming discussions. Of course, it required professional on-site setup by the IT department of Janelia, and some coordination by the session chair. The workshop was small and organized in a single seminar room, which allowed us stay tuned for the whole meeting using a single meeting link. But most importantly, this was a highly productive meeting, and it demonstrated that remote participation is a real option. I am not advertising Zoom or any other particular platform, this is just what we used. And it is a great start.
What can be improved in future:
- Video streaming of talks and discussions with two tiers: registered attendees who can ask questions and present, and unregistered ones who can only listen. In fact, video streaming of all scientific conferences should become a new norm, so that lay people can tune in and get the latest scientific news, for which they already paid with their taxes.
- Availability of electronic avatars in the conference room, so online participants can join individual groups in the breaks and communicate more personally. Otherwise the online participants are locked to one screen and one camera.
- Active development of VR solutions for interactive immersion in a conference. This sounds like science fiction now, but it will happen soon, and will completely change the way we share knowledge.
Are these changes too radical? Or are we scientists too conservative in our thinking? The sudden and dramatic spread of coronavirus suggests that we must rapidly find more sustainable ways of conferencing. This will make scientific communication more diverse, resilient, and inclusive than ever.
Update March 2020: COVID changes the rules
Since I wrote the original article, the Coronavirus outbreak made the remote conferencing much more urgent when I could anticipate. Scientific meetings around the world are being cancelled, and scientists campaign to post their presentations as YouTube videos. Only a month ago this was an utter heresy, and now this becomes a new trend!
Update September 2020: My first fully virtual conference
The LSFM2020 microscopy conference, organized by the Royal Microscopy Society, was held fully virtual and free of charge. More than 670 attendees around the globe, with up to 200 people attending the talks and posters in each session at any given time. All sessions were well timed (a rare thing in a conference), and there were up to 3 sessions running in parallel. All via Zoom.
The conference was carefully orchestrated by the chairs, who invited speakers to unmute and share their screens when their time was on. The attendees were asked to turn off video and mute themselves, which made the experience smooth and distraction-free for everyone. Questions and discussions ran in the chat window, and chairs read loud select questions if the time allowed. All sessions were recorded and available after the conference. Truly open scientific community!
What can be improved?
Mostly the Zoom interface itself. Switching between parallel sessions was difficult, because Zoom allows only one session at a time. Chat history was erased every time you left, so you could not read full discussion and see the links posted by the organizers before you joined the session.
But this format of a major microscopy conference was unthinkable a year ago. The COVID pandemic 2020 made us rethink and change the way we do and share science.
