The COVID-19 pandemic has forced scientists to share their research at virtual conferences over the past year.Credit: Laurence Dutton / Getty
Although researchers, like everyone else, get ‘Zoom fatigue’, they have learned to appreciate virtual science conferences during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a survey of more than 900 Nature readers. After a year of online research presentations, the majority of respondents (74%) believe that scientific meetings should remain virtual, or have a virtual component, after the pandemic has ended. Readers cite the ease of attendance from anywhere in the world as a major benefit, although acknowledging that virtual events could not simulate the network of colleagues they personally enjoy.
“I appreciate the field of online conferencing,” one respondent wrote. “However, I really miss the opportunity to meet people and to communicate with friends and colleagues.”
It has been a year since the first launch of a scientific conference due to the pandemic was very well known. The American Physical Society (APS) stopped its March meeting a few days before it would begin on March 2, 2020 in Denver, Colorado, and launch a series of similar cancellations – and launch a ‘new normal’ for researchers.
After the challenge of switching virtual, the organizers of the conference must now logistically and financially consider how to combine the best of both worlds by incorporating virtual elements when resuming personal meetings.
A greater reach
Many researchers say they have been able to attend meetings more than ever before in the past year because of online portals. From the readers who responded to it Nature‘s poll has seen 75% attend several virtual meetings since last March, and another 18% have attended at least one.
Tell Samantha Lawler, an astronomer at the University of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada Nature that virtual platforms have enabled her to attend meetings without sacrificing her learning load or responsibilities as a parent of young children.
And Joan Larrahondo, a civil engineer at Pontifical Xavierian University in Bogotá, is excited to attend conferences that were previously impossible to attend in person due to travel costs and logistics. He was also invited to present his research at more meetings than before.
In addition to accessibility, respondents said that the largest carbon footprint provided by virtual meetings. Case in point: according to one estimate, the 2019 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) – which brought more than 25,000 participants to San Francisco, California – produced the equivalent of 80,000 tons of carbon dioxide due to the participant’s journey alone.
“In the past, it was just a struggle to get conference organizers to even acknowledge the possibility of a virtual conference,” says Lorraine Whitmarsh, an environmental psychologist at the University of Bath, UK. Now she is optimistic that scientists will reconsider traditional conference models that require participants to “fly” a number of times a year.
More than any other career group, students enjoyed virtual meetings because of their lower costs Nature‘s survey. Twenty-seven percent of student respondents cited cost as the biggest benefit, compared to about 17% of respondents further in their careers. Virtual events require no travel, which can be expensive and often have lower registration fees. For example, the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE), organized jointly with two other small associations, reduced the student’s registration fee from more than US $ 300 for a personal event to as low as $ 10. for the upcoming virtual meeting of 2021.
Imperfect simulation
Despite the benefits of virtual events, they do have disadvantages, say researchers, including screen time exhaustion and conflict with time zone planning. Overwhelmingly, however, researchers agree that the biggest drawback is the lack of networking opportunities.
“The idea of going to conferences to get just the latest scientific insights is completely outdated,” says Teun Bousema, an infectious disease pathologist at Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands.
Lawler says the loss of improvised interactions at online events makes it harder to connect graduate students with other members of her network who may one day serve as mentors or collaborators.
Conference organizers try to find solutions, including formal mentorship programs that connect early-stage scientists with established and virtual ‘lobbies’ on conference platforms where attendees can meet and greet each other between presentations. According to many respondents, including one who told, it is not enough Nature that “virtual platforms suck the soul of true scientific collaboration”.
Yet many respondents told Nature that virtual networks have not been bad yet. Hawley Helmbrecht, a PhD student in chemical engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle, says scientists and introverts in early careers may find it less intimidating to ask questions during virtual sessions and reach out to new people – including prominent scientists – as during person meetings.
Scientists with disabilities also warn that the benefits of virtual conferences are not black and white. “I have some disabilities that make it easier to attend from home,” wrote one respondent, “but I still miss the network and have problems with technology not working well.”
An uncertain future
Conference organizers are still working to provide a better virtual experience for scientists, a year after moving online. “It’s like flying an airplane while building it,” said Hunter Clemens, director of meetings at the APS.
But they are also struggling with an uncertain future – and financial strife. Some scientific societies do not benefit from their personal conferences and rather organize them on a break-even basis. Others, however, earn some income from the events. The cancellation of the place due to the pandemic, in particular, caused societies financial burdens because at the same time they were navigating the logistics of a new virtual world.
The evolutionary biologist Mitch Cruzan of Portland State University in Oregon helped plan the 2021 virtual conference hosted by SSE, which typically attracts about 1,800 participants in person. He is worried about the future of the small conference of his society. Before the pandemic took place, Cruzan’s planning team had booked rooms for its annual meetings four years earlier. Now the organizers are trying to renegotiate local contracts and reschedule future conferences until 2026 to avoid cancellation fees of $ 100,000. “This experience has proven to us that we are more financially vulnerable than we thought,” Cruzan says.
The novelty of virtual conferences has declined in recent years, but it will likely be here to stay, even if there are personal events, says Pamela Ballinger, senior director of meetings and exhibitions at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). The AACR annual meeting, which typically attracts 22,000 participants in person, is likely to be hybrid in 2022. But the payment of personal conference rooms as well as a virtual platform is probably unhindered for the smaller, special conferences of the association. .
Yet Larrahondo and others hope that meeting organizers will prioritize the increased accessibility associated with virtual platforms. Keeping future meetings exclusively personal can further harm researchers from countries with low vaccination rates against COVID-19. Not only will these researchers be vulnerable to infection if they choose to travel without prior vaccination, but some may even experience travel restrictions without documentation showing that they have received a shot. “It will be sad if we just go back to the old way of doing things,” he says.