Improving on legacy conferences by moving online

eLife

Konrad P Kording¹  Titipat Achakulvisut²  Tulakan Ruangrong³  Sofie Van Den Bossche⁴  Dan FM Goodman⁵  Brad Wyble⁶  Isil Bilgin⁷ 

[1] Department of Bioengineering and the Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States;Department of Bioengineering, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States;Department of Biomedical Engineering, Mahidol University, Nakhon Pathom, Thailand;Department of Data Analysis, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium;Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom;Department of Psychology, Penn State University, University Park, United States;School of Biological Sciences, University of Reading, Reading, United Kingdom;

关键词: scientific meetings and conferences;    scientific community;    research culture;    collaboration;    neuroscience;    climate change;   

DOI  :  10.7554/eLife.57892

来源: publisher

【 摘 要 】

Scientific conferences and meetings have an important role in research, but they also suffer from a number of disadvantages: in particular, they can have a massive carbon footprint, they are time-consuming, and the high costs involved in attending can exclude many potential participants. The COVID-19 pandemic has led to the cancellation of many conferences, forcing the scientific community to explore online alternatives. Here, we report on our experiences of organizing an online neuroscience conference, neuromatch, that attracted some 3000 participants and featured two days of talks, debates, panel discussions, and one-on-one meetings facilitated by a matching algorithm. By offering most of the benefits of traditional conferences, several clear advantages, and with fewer of the downsides, we feel that online conferences have the potential to replace many legacy conferences.

【 授权许可】

CC BY