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Lessons and Silver Linings in Research Dissemination: Should COVID-19 Provide a Push Toward Lasting Change?
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Lessons and Silver Linings in Research Dissemination: Should COVID-19 Provide a Push Toward Lasting Change?
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[MUSIC PLAYING]
LORI CARLIN: Hello, everyone, and welcome. I'm Lori Carlin, chief commercial officer at Delta Think and your moderator for our session today. I first met two of our three speakers about a year ago while interviewing them for a client project. The interview was about a preprint they had posted, which was subsequently published in a number of places including Nature Human Behavior this past March 2021, entitled Changing Scientific Meetings for the Better.
LORI CARLIN: And I should add this is work that they coincidentally started before COVID hit, coincidentally and fortuitously. I've also had the pleasure of speaking with a number of the authors of the paper and the preprint for other projects around research dissemination. And every time I do, I'm struck by not only the depth of their knowledge and the evidence that they've gathered on the subject but their passion, personal passion as advocates for change in this area.
LORI CARLIN: And I think you will be too. So I'm very pleased to bring this to this group of researchers to you all. Just a quick introduction before we move to the presentation with me today in order of appearance. We have our first speaker is Dr. Humberto Debat from the Center of Agronomic Research, National Institute of Agriculture Technology in Argentina, who will discuss the challenges researchers face accessing information.
LORI CARLIN: Followed by Dr. Tomislav Mestrovic from the University North, University Center Varazdin in Croatia, who will discuss his experiences in Europe attending and organizing virtual conferences. And then Dr. Sarvenaz Sarabipour from Johns Hopkins University in the US and originally from Iran will discuss future directions and improvements in research dissemination.
LORI CARLIN: A few housekeeping items before we begin meeting hashtag, as you all know, is #SSP2021. You can view this session in full screen by clicking on the theater mode. Attendees can click on the CC icon at the bottom for closed captioning. And we're going to try to use the chat box in Pathable for questions and answers. Lastly, I just want to say before I hand over the mic to our speakers that I'm grateful they agreed to speak with us today at SSP and share their findings and their passions with you all.
LORI CARLIN: And as a reminder, it's this virtual environment that makes it possible to bring these international voices to us today. So with that, I am going to stop sharing my screen and hand this over to Humberto to start and Sarvenaz is going to share.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: OK. Thank you, Lori. It's a pleasure to be here in this meeting. I am very honoured about the invitation and also to join again with Sarvenaz, you, and Tomislav in this beautiful journey that has been this project. Of course, it was all led by Sarvenaz and incredible energy and power to integrate the visions of different people from different countries to try to understand these issues in particular.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: Before the start of this project, we have some anecdotal data on the challenges of international meetings in terms of what we have experienced, in particular, in terms of inclusion privilege and sustainability of the system. What I mean is that as a Latin American researcher, I have experienced firsthand about the limits that we face in joining this scientific community, which is a science.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: And science is a dialogue, is a conversation. And we face many, many obstacles to join this conversation. Some of them are geographical. But mostly, they are economical and geopolitical. So after we started studying the ecosystem of international meetings, we find out before the pandemic, a lot of issues. Some of them appears to be chronic and have been sustained and are still a major problem in recent communications.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: Some of them, you already know that have to be with the diversity statements and, of course, gender equity in terms of many, many, many meetings where there is gender disparity. And you see a lot of manners where women are marginalized in the community in terms of leadership and as commons in the general research community.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: Some of other issues that we found, of course, had to do with traveling. Traveling of this international in-person meetings reflects the degeneration of millions of tons of CO2, which means a lot of climate impact of these activities. Also, there are some other issues that have to be with activity beyond the academy that usually relies on women.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: Some of them, for instance, there are no caregiver grants or child care services or nursing homes in most of these events. I think that we have grasped some of the aspects that are happening in this community by assessing those 270 meetings. One of the central aspect, it's about money. We sum up all that input together and only those 270 meeting, which is just a very small sample of the scholarly communications.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: International conference in general, we calculated that they had spend almost US $1.3 billion in attending and generated those meetings. So that could be a figure that is not as important in some countries. But for people in Latin America where budgets are always a compromise, are always limited, and we have to choose between joining these privileged meetings all over the world or instead of doing research itself or spending that to fund fellowships for our colleagues, it's a very important issue in terms of inclusion of our-- and more beyond because it has a lot to do with taxpayer money.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: In Latin America, most of the research enterprise is funded by public funds. So we have to be very reasonable about what we spend this money on. Even if we choose to do this, it could signify that we are only allowing one or two members of our laps, of our community to join this conversation. And everybody else is left behind.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: So we have to do a lot with getting an invitation or something like that to participate in this meeting. Here, there's the carbon footprint one. On the next slide, it has to do with also the visas and the importance of restrictions to traveling for people from different countries that are not already able to join these meetings because they need the approval of the authorities from different countries because there are these limits that go beyond academy that had to do with the possibility to travel or not.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: I don't have the time to, but I have changed a lot of what I was going to say in this panel because we are right now, in Argentina experience the pick of the COVID pandemic. Our hospitals are crowded. And we don't have places to put our people, and there are lots of people is dying. And I was remembering that one of the first people that we detected with this disease in Argentina came from the USA.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: It came from Boston. Like a year ago, this has to do a lot with in-person meeting. And during the 26th of February in the Boston area, a biotech international event happened there that eventually led to almost 300,000 infections only in the US in almost 29 states and also in several countries. So that was a very small meeting, about 175 persons.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: But eventually, because there is a paper published four months ago that show that the special genetic marker of the genomes of the virus isolated in that even, it was easily followed. So that generated only 300,000 other cases only in the US. And it also affected many, many countries besides that. So another argument about the problems or issues of conference itself now has to do, during the pandemic, with saving lives.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: So this happened in February after we knew a lot about this virus and there was a lot of emergency calls. But many people still were generating these in-person meetings. So now one year and a half after, there are some initiatives to try to start using more digital mode of communications because one of the main aspects is to save the possibility to generate sanitary problems all over the world.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: So thank you.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: Thank you, Humberto. And this is definitely the good point because we emphasized the spread of disease in many figures in our manuscript. And we referenced it a lot. But I think it's time to move from just anecdotal data regarding conferences to publish studies. And this is indeed starting to emerge. One salient example is a global online survey assessing the experience of neurosurgeons and trainees with virtual conferences where they have also questioned the respondents about how they see the future of on-site conferences of scientific meetings.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: And in this study on the left, you'll see a graph from this study on the left, there was a total of 96 countries included. And the majority of respondents thought that attending virtual conferences significantly improved their knowledge of the best evidence-based practice and the level of care they have provided to their patients. But importantly, from our perspective, the majority of respondents also found that virtual conferencing provided them with adequate networking opportunities and indicated that their participation in future learning activities would likely increase.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: So this is an important finding. But also, from this study, country-wise comparisons are really important. And it clearly showed that respondents were more likely to increase their participation in virtual conferences in the future. And basically advocated replacing all on-site neurosurgical meetings with online meetings if they were from low and middle-income countries in comparison to high income countries.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: And of course, that was especially evident for sub-Saharan Africa as compared to North America, which is expected of course. But for many researchers, the playing field was broadened up significantly. This is what this study showed. But interestingly in this study also, European and central Asian neurosurgeons were also more likely to propose such recommendations when compared to North America neurosurgeons.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: And this may suggest that the culture had a significant role here. That will have to be taken into account when we will make organizational decisions in the future. Although caution has to be exerted because the study clearly shows that this depends on conference fees, as those from low-income nations are not so prone to pay the same fee for online conferences as for on site ones.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: And the study on the right is also one good example that comes from the European Academy of Neurology, which held free of charge virtual conference in May 2020. And in this study, they have explicitly stated that their motivation was the lack of systematic studies on this topic, which we also wanted to address in our paper. And they wanted to evaluate the attendance and perceived quality of the yearly conference in virtual format compared to the latest face-to-face summit.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: And what did they found? Well, compared to 2019, in their conference, the number of participants tripled. So it was more than 20,000 compared to approximately 7,000 in 2019. And the cumulative number of participants attending the sessions were five times higher. And out of active participants, 55% from outside Europe and 21% for students.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: And interestingly again, the European participants streamed sessions twice as often compared to the other participants. But overall, from all participants together, the content of the congress was evaluated as above expectation by more than 50% of attendees. And the authors also state that the geographical distribution of the participants prove the expected higher inclusivity of a virtual conference.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: And concluded that the large participation of students and neurologists in trainings opens new educational venues for the European Academy of Neurology. So they are quite optimistic, considering their findings. And this can be compared-- I recently can account to the wittingly named Saved project in the UK that has provided self-isolating trainees the ability to work from home to develop online tutorials that have been well received and widely utilized by colleagues in the UK and beyond.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: And this was also published in the British Journal of Anesthesia. And of course, I said we have to move beyond case examples, but one notable successful example that quite recently happened or quite recently was published and that includes early career researchers is the 6th Young Microbiologist Symposium on microbe signaling. And this was originally scheduled to be held at the University of Southampton in late August 2020.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: But instead, went completely virtual and with amazing satisfaction rates in the post conference and in the follow-up survey. And basically, what the survey showed was that 92% of the survey participants found the scientific program good or very good. More than 96% were interested in attending a future virtual or at least hybrid conference. So they stated they took this into account for their future planning endeavours.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: So next what I would like to emphasize is also my experience in organizing something similar. So on March 4 every year, the International HPV Awareness Day is held under the auspices of the International Papillomavirus Society. And this year, it was its fourth iteration. And I organize it every year at my university with more than 100 attendees.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: And while last year we were able to have a life event because start of March just before the pandemic has started in Croatia or spilled over here, this year, we went completely virtual, and I must say, with great success. I had doubled the number of participants. And I had guest lecturers from Africa and very distant towns in Croatia that I wouldn't be able to have before.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: And also, the discussion after the event was very lively. Luckily, I had experience to work with Sarvenaz and the group and already had the idea on how would I approach the organization of the event. But nevertheless, what were the key takeaway messages from this event? In my experience, some people think, well, it's virtual, so it means it will be less work to do it. No.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: If anything, the opposite is true, especially when you don't have a system in place yet for planning great online events and you're using freely available tools like I have used. So there is a need to start preparing early because there is still a large amount of work you have to put in. In other words, to host a virtual event requires the same care and attention as an in-person event.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: And with both events, you have to effectively promote it. You have to engage the attendees. And you have to, in a way, create memorable moments for attendees. And in a way, after the event, prove that the event was successful. And also, speakers especially leaders need detailed guidelines, and there is a need to conduct the prep calls.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: For example, you do the training not just to highlight the technical aspect but also to provide lecturers tips for how to make everybody feel welcome, how to strike up a conversation, and create engagement if nobody's talking, and how to guide them to the community after the session ends. And these are really, really important points. And actually, I have noticed the participants felt more comfortable asking questions during the Q&A session, especially in the chat, when compared to my previous live events that I have held before.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: And of course, no amount of planning will allow you to host a flawless event, virtual or otherwise. Many things can happen that you don't anticipate. And although I had a successful tech check, I had technical issues with the guest professor from Ghana. But we solve it in the end, but there is always a need to have a backup plan. So the common theme, an issue that I often see stated is the global quality of networking in virtual conferences.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: And this is a common complaint of some participants that participated in virtual conferences. But there are actually creative solutions for that. In some other European conferences that I have attended made a great use of breakout rooms that randomly allocate people to mix in small groups or one to one. So actually there is a chance to meet a big shot professor that you may not be able to meet, for example, if you had an on-site conference.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: And particularly the speed networking translates very well to the online surroundings. But then, again, this is anecdotal evidence for which we have to remove ourselves. And this is something this group aimed to do, at least as a first step with our publication. First in the pre-print version and now of course, in Nature of Human Behavior. So now, I give over to the study lead, Sarvenaz.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC:
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: Thank you very much. I hope you can hear me. And thank you Tomislav and Humberto. I'm apologizing if I cut you off earlier, but very honored to have worked with the same. And we found very interesting things that the other speakers highlighted. But looking at some of the conferences of 2020, virtual conferences, I found that there were more inclusive in terms of number of attendees across very diverse fields.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: And in general, there were 3 to 10 times higher number of attendees from many more countries as you can see on the left. So it's a number of attendees and on the geographic diversity I've done. Looking specifically at early career researchers, which we are, and early career researchers are the largest part of the scientific community, as you know, you can see that the numbers were very high in virtual mode compared to in-person mode.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: And this is the first time that virtual conferences were held, and they were held during a pandemic. So I think that this is very encouraging. I have to note that all three of the conferences that you can see here were free to attend. And as was mentioned earlier, the registration fee if more than $50 to $100, it becomes a barrier for everyone. And this was very interesting to see, the incredible participation of this year.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: And of course, with the amount of data that is accessible, I was also able to look at a number of these conferences compared to the 2019 version, which was in person. And as you can see, only really 2020 conferences were able to capture the diversity that we have in researcher population in the world.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: So the conferences become less uniform and more heterogeneous in terms of participants in the visual mode. And I think that this is the first time we are seeing it. And this is very encouraging. These conferences have run in person for decades. Some centuries. So this level of opening up and open communication was very much overdue. We are in both studies, one examining in-person conferences and offering recommendations.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: And the later one on virtual conferences, we came up with a number of key points. As you can see on the right, virtual conferences have very clear advantages, especially for organizers, and some of them very obviously for attendees. But I think one of the central points is that science is not just research. It's also about research culture. So we have to think all of us, as participants, as organizers, we have to think deeply about this because these are affecting our lives.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: There are 10 million researchers worldwide. And as a result, the wider public, the entire world's population. So there are short term and long-term impacts that are at work. And we have to work and elaborate on this so that we can actually impact policy within scientific community and worldwide. We have talked about open science elements, of course, all of us, especially this esteemed audience.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: So open the manuscript, preprints, open access peer-reviewed articles. Open materials that we have been exchanging have been very valuable. So has been open code. So now it's very much time to think about open access conferences. And as other speakers pointed out, this has been on our minds for a long time.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: We finally were able to articulate it in published form last year, but it has been on our minds. And early career researchers are dealing with this constantly. They don't have access to research, and they don't have access to researchers. Some of our recommendations for what the new format and organization could include is that there are specific elements for promoting early career researchers.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: That deliberate fostering of interactions are very important from organizers. It's important to have the meeting statistics released. As you saw Tomislav pointed out that with these statistics, we can compare and actually have useful conclusions from the event. It's also important because when we did our first study, we had to look into 270 conferences.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: None of them had their information readily available. So it was very time consuming. It's very important that conferences mandate open access dissemination of the material. And we have seen this at virtual conferences. And it's important that researchers with disabilities can still attend and interact at virtual conferences, as some researchers may have financial challenges. And we think that it's important that organizers source sponsors locally or internationally.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: So to researchers, we really hope that they talk to the organizers of the conferences in their scientific society and really discuss these issues with them. So thank you very much for your time. I would like to thank Lori Carlin and other speakers. And it was an absolute pleasure to be here today and to talk to you. And we are very much looking forward to your questions in the Q&A session.
LORI CARLIN: Thank you all so much. This has been fantastic. As I said earlier, I've spoken to you all a few times and another of your authors, others of your colleagues who were also on this paper. And every time I speak to you folks, I learn some really valuable information. So thank you for sharing your time today. I welcome questions in the Q&A. We will start off, but we left plenty of time for discussion and questions.
LORI CARLIN: So please don't be shy. If we were in person, I'd have my roving mic and be going around the audience asking folks to participate. But I'll do the best I can in this virtual environment. I'm going to start off with I think a meaty question. We've been talking about conferences. But the dissemination of research obviously happens well beyond the conference environment.
LORI CARLIN: So are there other challenges or changes, I should say, because likely there are other challenges that you'd like to see in terms of dissemination and access to scholarly research in general? Thinking about preprints, open access, what is your thoughts on just the general dissemination of research information and the challenges you face or have faced and what your thoughts are on what would make things better?
LORI CARLIN: I know any one of you could talk about this. Any takers for first position? Humberto.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: I'd have to take that question. As a matter of fact, we have been experiencing for the last few years a shift in the form of real time scholar communications to a state where we have now the networking, like Twitter and microPublication, the elementation of frequency in the adoption of preprint servers, and a lot of innovation in peer review in terms of transparency and real time assessments of data.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: During the pandemic, there are also many, many initiatives dealing with things like outbreak science or other repositories. Some platform, some innovation instruments that have helped to assess the real time generation and evaluation of knowledge. In that sense, we have to start thinking about-- this is a personal view, about what is the real impact now about scholarly meetings and conference itself.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: We have said in our presentation that we are spending billions of dollars in these activities. Much of this industry has to do with traveling, hotels, convention centers, and many, many, many, many economical aspects of this enterprise. So one question that we are experiencing a lot of time is what we are getting out of all this money, because we have a lot of answers that has to do with anecdotal data and tangible responses.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: Many of them has to do with, oh, we really need is our informal meetings during the coffee break and our cocktails in their party. And on many things that had to do with flying away to an exotic place to join with a lot of colleagues and try to have something like an academic holidays. So I guess what I had to say is just we really have to think about just things in this new context. And we have to remember that the traveling flight and going to this in-person meetings, international meetings is a privilege.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: And we're leaving behind a lot of people when we choose to do these activities. We also have to think what these resources could be used for. I don't know if my answer had to do a lot with research communication, but that's something that I experience every day. Now I'm able to read almost the newest information in my field of research every day in the networks.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: And I think that in some aspects, international medias are starting to build a chronicle because before this real time sharing of academic outputs, the international meetings were a place where you discuss and publish results or things that you were experimenting right now when you're thinking about doing in the near future. So now, when we start to share the things as right as we make them, we have to really question ourselves what are we taking out of this.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: But please, any of the other panelists might have a different personal take on this. Thank you.
LORI CARLIN: Sarvenaz or Tomislav.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: Yeah, I would just like to extent on Humberto's answer and say that I think 2020 and 2021 was finally a year that we removed the stigma out of preprints. And maybe this is a path towards a time when finally journals will compete for manuscripts that they found online or on preprints and not vise versa. Because sometimes resubmitting and resubmitting and resubmitting takes so much valuable time out of research, researcher's pocket, which could be invested in research.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: And also, another positive thing is many studies with negative results can now be more easily published preprint servers, which then removes publication bias. So I think these are some positive developments. And this can be especially extended to the conferences. And I really echo Humberto's string about faster research dissemination. So when I was a Young Leader Circle of the American Society of Microbiology, we try to do a joint project with the European Society for Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases to make a Twitter conference on clinical microbiology.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: It was more like a course. And it had its success, but I think it was not the right time to try it. But I think now with all these changes and with the change of the viewpoint about Twitter, about other means of communicating science, I think we will have some positive progress in that regard Thank you.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: Yes, I agree completely with the panelists. I think that unfortunately without a pandemic, it seems that we weren't really actively going towards the direction of mass virtual conferencing. We noted two conferences, one in optics, the other in neuroscience, that were planned virtual in 2019 far ahead of the pandemic. But unfortunately, it wasn't very widespread, and it wasn't really going to be very widespread.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: It seems that unless the majority or all of the scientific community intends to do something, we won't actually achieve accelerated or wide-reaching change. I agree that the virtual conferences have really enabled sharing of materials, a lot of abstracts. A lot of attendees have recorded their talks or have them available on YouTube. I do think that the scientific community has relied on return form of communication for too long.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: And we are missing face time. I think for particularly early career researchers, they don't see other researchers talk or how they talk. And they can't be inspired really. And I think there's a big gap and missed opportunity in that. And I think virtual conferences really democratized access. As early career researchers, we really cherish this.
LORI CARLIN: Great. Thank you all. Those were great answers. We have a couple of interesting questions coming in on the chat. I'll start with the first one is, do you feel that hybrid conferences address all or most of your concerns versus in-person conferences? Or do you worry that individuals attending virtually when there is also an in-person component just won't get the same experience as attending in person?
LORI CARLIN: Whomever would like to start off here. Maybe Sarvenaz, do you want to take that one to start?
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: Yes. Thank you. I think that most of the conversation has been-- sometimes on social media, sometimes on other channels, has really been focused on, OK, the pandemic will be over, let's move to hybrid conferences. But I think there isn't a lot of thinking or planning really behind this conference. It's just there, it's just a plan at the moment. A hybrid conference, based on experience of some researchers in Germany that actually organized one in 2019, needs much more effort from the organizers if the intention is to have equitable conference that gives the benefits of presentation and networking to both types of attendees, in-person and virtual.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: We have referenced this, I believe, and I can leave the link to this wonderful conference that happened in Germany. It was hybrid. And basically researchers met locally, and the event was broadcasted internationally. And there may have been a networking element to this as well. But I wanted to just quickly mention that I think we don't have to necessarily translate in-person conferences to virtual format or hybrid format.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: We can actually decouple presentation and listening to science from networking. So networking can happen year long. Networking can happen in person or virtual and through dedicated online platforms that societies form or researchers or universities form. And presenting science or listening to science can happen once or twice a year in every discipline.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: And it can happen fully virtually. So there isn't really this mandate to literally translate in-person conferences to fully virtual or hybrid. It's completely feasible to have longer networking period and shorter, maybe one or two week, dissemination of research time.
LORI CARLIN: Yeah. Humberto or Tomislav, anything you want to add there?
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: If I can just add even in the paper, we proposed something that-- like to create local hubs that can be done virtually network with other local hubs in other cities. And I think this is also a good approach, how to tackle this issue. Even before COVID, there were some conferences organized as hybrid ones. And I attended one.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: I was in person, but there were hybrid individuals connected. And I think at least then, it highly depended on the organizer, how he will include those people that were virtually present. Will he read the questions? Will he include them in some other way? So this is also something that needs some guidelines because it's something that, as Sarvenaz said, it will take even more organizing effort than organize a full virtual conference.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: And this is something to take into account. And all the other things that we mentioned in the manuscript, of bringing people from far away places to do-- one place to have a conference and gather.
LORI CARLIN: Yeah, and it reminds me too, it takes rethinking, right? We're not necessarily talking about taking a conference that was in person and then mimicking it online. There are differences. There are pluses and minuses to both types. And it's an opportunity to take the pluses of an online environment and make something different that is also valuable as well.
LORI CARLIN: We've another question in the chat about Zoom fatigue or just being online fatigue. And the questioner was saying that their researchers are complaining about this aspect of online meetings and online learning. Any advice or thoughts on that? The fact that it can be more fatiguing to be virtual on the computer looking at and talking to people, watching talks.
LORI CARLIN: It can be harder to concentrate, to carve out that time in your day to say I am going to attend this or I am going to participate in this. Any thoughts around that?
HUMBERTO DEBAT: Well, I have read about some fatigue. There are many articles regarding that. We have all experienced fatigue of our meetings online or being online all the time. I have to say that what Sarvenaz mentioned before that something that doesn't happen chronically could have an impact on that. If you agree to do some meeting, but all the resources are uploaded to the net, like, I don't know, YouTube or et cetera, you are able to see those events whenever you want.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: And also about some of these very aspects, I don't know how to put this on. But for instance, there is a lot of concern I have read about some bombing. But at the same time, there are countries that are being bombed right now. So there is some kind of triviality when you put everything in perspective of what is the problem and what is not.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: I mean there are certain things that has to do with a lot of critiques about the virtual system that has to do a lot with things that could be minor or details or things that could be improved or worked on it. But you really have to think if that's a problem itself or just some things that you are not accustomed to or that you are really accustomed to something that which is the status quo of the last 100 years of meetings.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: And you are seeing a lot of things that you don't want to change. But well, anything. Perhaps my answer has to do with perspective, with seeing this in a broader way and thinking about the issues and things that people experience all over the world and could be a little bit more impactful or important in terms of accessibility, sustainability, inclusion, equity, or privilege.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: Thanks.
LORI CARLIN: Excellent.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: What I would add to that also is something that Sarvenaz briefly touched upon previously is that with virtual conferences, you don't need to stack everything in two or three days because you don't need to spend millions of renting a venue and inviting everybody in that huge venue. So you create a longer conference. And this is one of the steps how to avoid Zoom fatigue in the future. And the longer the conference will also provide more opportunity for more interaction, for more networking, and basically recreate all these events that we miss so dearly from in-person conferences, so to say.
LORI CARLIN: Absolutely. So moving on, we have another question about networking. And I know Tomislav, in particular, you did touch on this when you spoke about the European conferences that you organized. So I don't know if you want to start this one off. But really there is a lack of the ability to network as well. But then there are pluses. So you're not going to be bumping into somebody in the hall or sitting next to them accidentally or serendipitously at a session.
LORI CARLIN: But you did speak about a speed networking kind of thing where you have an opportunity to sit down in a room with folks that you may never be able to meet in person. Are there other ideas that you folks have for networking that work well, especially in a virtual environment? And Tomislav, I don't know if you want to start that one off?
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: Yeah, like I mentioned that example where you-- and I encountered this in one European and one US conference when they serendipitously just create those breakout sessions, breakout rooms. And then you have opportunity one on one or two to one to meet somebody who is well up in the field. That's how I met somebody from the Mayo Clinic that stop the infectious diseases, which I would not have had the opportunity before. But even before virtual conferencing took off really, we also tried to do some virtual networking especially when you enter some new program or some conference.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: You create the WhatsApp group, try to network there. This is something that can be translated to the virtual environment. It's not like we are completely unused to do it. It's just how to find the right venue and the right approach. And for now, this highly depends on the organizer. Like I said, some conferences will be great. Some just leave the attendants wandering in the dark, not knowing what to do, not knowing who is even attending the conference.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: But I think this is something that can be worked on and improved in the future.
LORI CARLIN: Great. Sarvenaz, did you want to add something there?
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: Yes, and I think we had discussed this before. This issue of networking was actually there before as well. Personally, I never found networking in person efficient. I do think that these events, as we also found out in our meta-research, are male-dominated conferences. Sciences, in fact. With just about 20% of professors are women, you hardly meet them at events.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: And even if you do, you may not actually interact with them. So people that knew each other would attend, and events would create exclusive parts where early career researchers wouldn't really be able to benefit from it. So I think this issue of networking was persistent and pre-existing. What a number of researchers have done for years is that they're networking over social platform, for example, Slack.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: I recently took leadership of one of these groups called Future PI Slack that I can share the link to. And this is a community of 4,000 post-doctoral fellows that aspire to continue their academic career towards professorship. We have been networking for four years. It's, of course, voluntary and whenever members have a chance. But they exchange information.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: They exchange resources. They discuss issues in their disciplines and in research culture. There are similar networks for early career professors called New PI Slack, and there is also one for graduate students called Grad Slack. There's also one for mid-career professors. So each of these have a few thousand members. And of course, this is a very small sample of the scientific community which has about 9, 10 million researchers.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: But it's a good example for how you can decouple dissemination of research from networking. And network at your own leisure, at your own time, and don't kind of lock down the science because you have to get a visa, find funds, and travel and exclude a lot of people to do that. I think this is the smart way to do it. Of course, I completely agree with what Tomislav suggested.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: And I think that networking is also possible at virtual conferences. I do think that scientific societies can do much more in this regard. I think that they have a great opportunity to connect researchers together over the year, not just once a year for five days.
LORI CARLIN: I think if we were in person right now and you could see the audience, I think all of them would have had their heads down. And they would be busy typing away or scribbling down all those networking groups that you just mentioned, Sarvenaz.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: I can share in the chat.
LORI CARLIN: I did. I put the Future PI Slack in the chat as well. So absolutely, those are great information. I'm also reminded-- so over the year that I've been engaging with you folks, I've spoken to authors of the paper who were able to be with us today. One of them is your colleague Fiona from Africa. And I remember Fiona telling me specifically that one of the benefits of having information available in this way was that even when she did go to a conference, she may have been the only one from her institution that was allowed to go.
LORI CARLIN: And she was busy networking and busy talking to people and didn't get to all the sessions she wanted to go to. Plus, some sessions are concurrent, and you can't be in multiple places at one time. And so having the information available when she got back to her institution to both refer to it herself, but also share it with her colleagues because oftentimes, that one person is not only tasked with going but with coming back and bringing information to their colleagues as well.
LORI CARLIN: And I think that that's an interesting point for our audience too, is the ability to even when you have an in-person conference, the ability to easily share some of that information too. I don't know if there's anything more you folks want to mention about that. But I remember talking specifically to Fiona about that issue.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: Yes, our colleagues actually in our conversation shared a lot of other issues that we couldn't include in the paper. There are personal, regional issues. There are barriers in terms of how much time they can take away from their job or who is going to provide the funds. And the funding system can be unfair towards early career researchers. So sparing US $2,000 to $4,000 for something like this that now we can't see can be easily shared mutually is not very sensible.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: Also, as you mentioned, the recordings are available because especially younger researchers or those who want to rewind and pay attention to things or attend the entire meeting, not parallel sessions, cannot do that very, very easily. This is very important, I think.
LORI CARLIN: Great. Thank you. All right, we just have a few more minutes left. So I'm going to close with a high level question here and ask each of you to weigh in on what you feel is the most important concept that we've been talking about today and what message would you like the attendees of the SSP meeting, who are sitting in on our session today or those who will listen to this at another time since this is being recorded and will be shared after the meeting.
LORI CARLIN: What message do you want them to walk away with from this session today? And who wants to go first? And Sarvenaz, I know you like to wrap up. I don't know if you want to go first or you want to go last in this--
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: Any order is fine.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: We will leave her to wrap up.
LORI CARLIN: OK, so Tomislav, you have the mic.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: Yeah, I would like to add something. So in the last year, one of the biggest buzzwords in the world was inclusion. And now, we have a perfect opportunity to make an inclusive society with these virtual conferences that will be more accessible by many researchers, more accessible by early career researchers. And so the inclusion would be the key concept that I would highlight from this perspective.
LORI CARLIN: Excellent. Humberto.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: Well, I agree with Tomislav that of course, that's a very important issue about trying to democratize this scientific sharing of information around the globe. And many think about Scientific Commons as a public good, which should be a right for every person to have access to information and to participate in scientific dialogue.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: So yeah, I totally agree about that. Then I have been reverberating about this question about really thinking about what we are getting out of all the resource we are spending in in-person meetings and try to rationalize that in the context of poverty, limited resource, and the reality that most researchers face around the globe that has very little attention in terms of what they are doing and what they can work in in this discussion.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: So yeah, inclusion is something that we really have to work on. And I think that during this year, we have learned that many, many, many things that we do in person we are able to do them remotely. And that has an important impact in terms of climate and carbon footprint. So also, that's another important aspect about equality.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: Of course, there are a lot of side effects of impacts in energy itself, et cetera. But equality brings on a lot of reduction, a very important reduction in terms of also economical expenses and also climate impacts. So that's two things that would like to say. Thank you for the invitation.
LORI CARLIN: And Sarvenaz.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: Yes, I really echo what my colleagues said. I think that-- I had three points to summarize, and I forgot the first one. Oh, OK, I remembered it. One common theme was that this is going to be like online teaching, this is going to be unlike running-- like running online running off a lab, this is going to be like online workspaces.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: And no, it's not sensible to conflate virtual conferences a couple of times a year with online teaching or online running off your lab or online workspaces. The second thing is that there are hundreds of thousands of researchers that are attending their first conference ever because it was virtual. And if you think of how in privileged nations we can't live without information and internet access on phone every second or without immediate access to an article or a preprint, then imagine how it would feel to attend a conference for the first time.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: I want this to sink in with the audience. And I think this is really important in terms of reframing scientific communication for years to come. And finally, I think that we have really underestimated how much our science can impact other researchers. I think we are in the dark ages of scientific communication. We have been.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: What we produce has been unheard of, has been unread. Our work is unexplored really. And we have been really not able to actually get the entire worth of our work out to the researchers and then have it benefit the public. So I think that virtual conferences are just the beginning of really enabling all researchers when they want to share science and really impact the world, as they should be with research funds.
LORI CARLIN: Thank you so much. That was great answers all of you and a wonderful wrap up. I have a few words of thanks, but I need to start with thanking all the three of you for giving your time. This is not part of your day job at all, and I so appreciate you being able to join us today and working on putting this presentation together with me. It's been a pleasure knowing all of you and bothering you over the last year at different times.
LORI CARLIN: I remember Humberto, I interviewed him for another project. And he apologized because he was busy giving COVID information, and his time was very limited. So I really thank our speakers today for participating. I hope you all found the session really informative and helpful thanks to SSP's annual meeting program committee and our generous sponsors. Be sure to check the interactive networking events, the marketplace gallery.
LORI CARLIN: A recording of the session will be available later today, I believe, and available through November. So you can come back and access if you missed anything. And again, thank you all for a great session today.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: Thank you.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: Thank you very much.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: Thank you very much. Thank you.
Segment:0 .
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LORI CARLIN: Hello, everyone, and welcome. I'm Lori Carlin, chief commercial officer at Delta Think and your moderator for our session today. I first met two of our three speakers about a year ago while interviewing them for a client project. The interview was about a preprint they had posted, which was subsequently published in a number of places including Nature Human Behavior this past March 2021, entitled Changing Scientific Meetings for the Better.
LORI CARLIN: And I should add this is work that they coincidentally started before COVID hit, coincidentally and fortuitously. I've also had the pleasure of speaking with a number of the authors of the paper and the preprint for other projects around research dissemination. And every time I do, I'm struck by not only the depth of their knowledge and the evidence that they've gathered on the subject but their passion, personal passion as advocates for change in this area.
LORI CARLIN: And I think you will be too. So I'm very pleased to bring this to this group of researchers to you all. Just a quick introduction before we move to the presentation with me today in order of appearance. We have our first speaker is Dr. Humberto Debat from the Center of Agronomic Research, National Institute of Agriculture Technology in Argentina, who will discuss the challenges researchers face accessing information.
LORI CARLIN: Followed by Dr. Tomislav Mestrovic from the University North, University Center Varazdin in Croatia, who will discuss his experiences in Europe attending and organizing virtual conferences. And then Dr. Sarvenaz Sarabipour from Johns Hopkins University in the US and originally from Iran will discuss future directions and improvements in research dissemination.
LORI CARLIN: A few housekeeping items before we begin meeting hashtag, as you all know, is #SSP2021. You can view this session in full screen by clicking on the theater mode. Attendees can click on the CC icon at the bottom for closed captioning. And we're going to try to use the chat box in Pathable for questions and answers. Lastly, I just want to say before I hand over the mic to our speakers that I'm grateful they agreed to speak with us today at SSP and share their findings and their passions with you all.
LORI CARLIN: And as a reminder, it's this virtual environment that makes it possible to bring these international voices to us today. So with that, I am going to stop sharing my screen and hand this over to Humberto to start and Sarvenaz is going to share.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: OK. Thank you, Lori. It's a pleasure to be here in this meeting. I am very honoured about the invitation and also to join again with Sarvenaz, you, and Tomislav in this beautiful journey that has been this project. Of course, it was all led by Sarvenaz and incredible energy and power to integrate the visions of different people from different countries to try to understand these issues in particular.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: Before the start of this project, we have some anecdotal data on the challenges of international meetings in terms of what we have experienced, in particular, in terms of inclusion privilege and sustainability of the system. What I mean is that as a Latin American researcher, I have experienced firsthand about the limits that we face in joining this scientific community, which is a science.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: And science is a dialogue, is a conversation. And we face many, many obstacles to join this conversation. Some of them are geographical. But mostly, they are economical and geopolitical. So after we started studying the ecosystem of international meetings, we find out before the pandemic, a lot of issues. Some of them appears to be chronic and have been sustained and are still a major problem in recent communications.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: Some of them, you already know that have to be with the diversity statements and, of course, gender equity in terms of many, many, many meetings where there is gender disparity. And you see a lot of manners where women are marginalized in the community in terms of leadership and as commons in the general research community.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: Some of other issues that we found, of course, had to do with traveling. Traveling of this international in-person meetings reflects the degeneration of millions of tons of CO2, which means a lot of climate impact of these activities. Also, there are some other issues that have to be with activity beyond the academy that usually relies on women.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: Some of them, for instance, there are no caregiver grants or child care services or nursing homes in most of these events. I think that we have grasped some of the aspects that are happening in this community by assessing those 270 meetings. One of the central aspect, it's about money. We sum up all that input together and only those 270 meeting, which is just a very small sample of the scholarly communications.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: International conference in general, we calculated that they had spend almost US $1.3 billion in attending and generated those meetings. So that could be a figure that is not as important in some countries. But for people in Latin America where budgets are always a compromise, are always limited, and we have to choose between joining these privileged meetings all over the world or instead of doing research itself or spending that to fund fellowships for our colleagues, it's a very important issue in terms of inclusion of our-- and more beyond because it has a lot to do with taxpayer money.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: In Latin America, most of the research enterprise is funded by public funds. So we have to be very reasonable about what we spend this money on. Even if we choose to do this, it could signify that we are only allowing one or two members of our laps, of our community to join this conversation. And everybody else is left behind.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: So we have to do a lot with getting an invitation or something like that to participate in this meeting. Here, there's the carbon footprint one. On the next slide, it has to do with also the visas and the importance of restrictions to traveling for people from different countries that are not already able to join these meetings because they need the approval of the authorities from different countries because there are these limits that go beyond academy that had to do with the possibility to travel or not.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: I don't have the time to, but I have changed a lot of what I was going to say in this panel because we are right now, in Argentina experience the pick of the COVID pandemic. Our hospitals are crowded. And we don't have places to put our people, and there are lots of people is dying. And I was remembering that one of the first people that we detected with this disease in Argentina came from the USA.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: It came from Boston. Like a year ago, this has to do a lot with in-person meeting. And during the 26th of February in the Boston area, a biotech international event happened there that eventually led to almost 300,000 infections only in the US in almost 29 states and also in several countries. So that was a very small meeting, about 175 persons.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: But eventually, because there is a paper published four months ago that show that the special genetic marker of the genomes of the virus isolated in that even, it was easily followed. So that generated only 300,000 other cases only in the US. And it also affected many, many countries besides that. So another argument about the problems or issues of conference itself now has to do, during the pandemic, with saving lives.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: So this happened in February after we knew a lot about this virus and there was a lot of emergency calls. But many people still were generating these in-person meetings. So now one year and a half after, there are some initiatives to try to start using more digital mode of communications because one of the main aspects is to save the possibility to generate sanitary problems all over the world.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: So thank you.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: Thank you, Humberto. And this is definitely the good point because we emphasized the spread of disease in many figures in our manuscript. And we referenced it a lot. But I think it's time to move from just anecdotal data regarding conferences to publish studies. And this is indeed starting to emerge. One salient example is a global online survey assessing the experience of neurosurgeons and trainees with virtual conferences where they have also questioned the respondents about how they see the future of on-site conferences of scientific meetings.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: And in this study on the left, you'll see a graph from this study on the left, there was a total of 96 countries included. And the majority of respondents thought that attending virtual conferences significantly improved their knowledge of the best evidence-based practice and the level of care they have provided to their patients. But importantly, from our perspective, the majority of respondents also found that virtual conferencing provided them with adequate networking opportunities and indicated that their participation in future learning activities would likely increase.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: So this is an important finding. But also, from this study, country-wise comparisons are really important. And it clearly showed that respondents were more likely to increase their participation in virtual conferences in the future. And basically advocated replacing all on-site neurosurgical meetings with online meetings if they were from low and middle-income countries in comparison to high income countries.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: And of course, that was especially evident for sub-Saharan Africa as compared to North America, which is expected of course. But for many researchers, the playing field was broadened up significantly. This is what this study showed. But interestingly in this study also, European and central Asian neurosurgeons were also more likely to propose such recommendations when compared to North America neurosurgeons.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: And this may suggest that the culture had a significant role here. That will have to be taken into account when we will make organizational decisions in the future. Although caution has to be exerted because the study clearly shows that this depends on conference fees, as those from low-income nations are not so prone to pay the same fee for online conferences as for on site ones.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: And the study on the right is also one good example that comes from the European Academy of Neurology, which held free of charge virtual conference in May 2020. And in this study, they have explicitly stated that their motivation was the lack of systematic studies on this topic, which we also wanted to address in our paper. And they wanted to evaluate the attendance and perceived quality of the yearly conference in virtual format compared to the latest face-to-face summit.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: And what did they found? Well, compared to 2019, in their conference, the number of participants tripled. So it was more than 20,000 compared to approximately 7,000 in 2019. And the cumulative number of participants attending the sessions were five times higher. And out of active participants, 55% from outside Europe and 21% for students.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: And interestingly again, the European participants streamed sessions twice as often compared to the other participants. But overall, from all participants together, the content of the congress was evaluated as above expectation by more than 50% of attendees. And the authors also state that the geographical distribution of the participants prove the expected higher inclusivity of a virtual conference.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: And concluded that the large participation of students and neurologists in trainings opens new educational venues for the European Academy of Neurology. So they are quite optimistic, considering their findings. And this can be compared-- I recently can account to the wittingly named Saved project in the UK that has provided self-isolating trainees the ability to work from home to develop online tutorials that have been well received and widely utilized by colleagues in the UK and beyond.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: And this was also published in the British Journal of Anesthesia. And of course, I said we have to move beyond case examples, but one notable successful example that quite recently happened or quite recently was published and that includes early career researchers is the 6th Young Microbiologist Symposium on microbe signaling. And this was originally scheduled to be held at the University of Southampton in late August 2020.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: But instead, went completely virtual and with amazing satisfaction rates in the post conference and in the follow-up survey. And basically, what the survey showed was that 92% of the survey participants found the scientific program good or very good. More than 96% were interested in attending a future virtual or at least hybrid conference. So they stated they took this into account for their future planning endeavours.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: So next what I would like to emphasize is also my experience in organizing something similar. So on March 4 every year, the International HPV Awareness Day is held under the auspices of the International Papillomavirus Society. And this year, it was its fourth iteration. And I organize it every year at my university with more than 100 attendees.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: And while last year we were able to have a life event because start of March just before the pandemic has started in Croatia or spilled over here, this year, we went completely virtual, and I must say, with great success. I had doubled the number of participants. And I had guest lecturers from Africa and very distant towns in Croatia that I wouldn't be able to have before.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: And also, the discussion after the event was very lively. Luckily, I had experience to work with Sarvenaz and the group and already had the idea on how would I approach the organization of the event. But nevertheless, what were the key takeaway messages from this event? In my experience, some people think, well, it's virtual, so it means it will be less work to do it. No.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: If anything, the opposite is true, especially when you don't have a system in place yet for planning great online events and you're using freely available tools like I have used. So there is a need to start preparing early because there is still a large amount of work you have to put in. In other words, to host a virtual event requires the same care and attention as an in-person event.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: And with both events, you have to effectively promote it. You have to engage the attendees. And you have to, in a way, create memorable moments for attendees. And in a way, after the event, prove that the event was successful. And also, speakers especially leaders need detailed guidelines, and there is a need to conduct the prep calls.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: For example, you do the training not just to highlight the technical aspect but also to provide lecturers tips for how to make everybody feel welcome, how to strike up a conversation, and create engagement if nobody's talking, and how to guide them to the community after the session ends. And these are really, really important points. And actually, I have noticed the participants felt more comfortable asking questions during the Q&A session, especially in the chat, when compared to my previous live events that I have held before.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: And of course, no amount of planning will allow you to host a flawless event, virtual or otherwise. Many things can happen that you don't anticipate. And although I had a successful tech check, I had technical issues with the guest professor from Ghana. But we solve it in the end, but there is always a need to have a backup plan. So the common theme, an issue that I often see stated is the global quality of networking in virtual conferences.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: And this is a common complaint of some participants that participated in virtual conferences. But there are actually creative solutions for that. In some other European conferences that I have attended made a great use of breakout rooms that randomly allocate people to mix in small groups or one to one. So actually there is a chance to meet a big shot professor that you may not be able to meet, for example, if you had an on-site conference.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: And particularly the speed networking translates very well to the online surroundings. But then, again, this is anecdotal evidence for which we have to remove ourselves. And this is something this group aimed to do, at least as a first step with our publication. First in the pre-print version and now of course, in Nature of Human Behavior. So now, I give over to the study lead, Sarvenaz.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC:
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: Thank you very much. I hope you can hear me. And thank you Tomislav and Humberto. I'm apologizing if I cut you off earlier, but very honored to have worked with the same. And we found very interesting things that the other speakers highlighted. But looking at some of the conferences of 2020, virtual conferences, I found that there were more inclusive in terms of number of attendees across very diverse fields.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: And in general, there were 3 to 10 times higher number of attendees from many more countries as you can see on the left. So it's a number of attendees and on the geographic diversity I've done. Looking specifically at early career researchers, which we are, and early career researchers are the largest part of the scientific community, as you know, you can see that the numbers were very high in virtual mode compared to in-person mode.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: And this is the first time that virtual conferences were held, and they were held during a pandemic. So I think that this is very encouraging. I have to note that all three of the conferences that you can see here were free to attend. And as was mentioned earlier, the registration fee if more than $50 to $100, it becomes a barrier for everyone. And this was very interesting to see, the incredible participation of this year.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: And of course, with the amount of data that is accessible, I was also able to look at a number of these conferences compared to the 2019 version, which was in person. And as you can see, only really 2020 conferences were able to capture the diversity that we have in researcher population in the world.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: So the conferences become less uniform and more heterogeneous in terms of participants in the visual mode. And I think that this is the first time we are seeing it. And this is very encouraging. These conferences have run in person for decades. Some centuries. So this level of opening up and open communication was very much overdue. We are in both studies, one examining in-person conferences and offering recommendations.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: And the later one on virtual conferences, we came up with a number of key points. As you can see on the right, virtual conferences have very clear advantages, especially for organizers, and some of them very obviously for attendees. But I think one of the central points is that science is not just research. It's also about research culture. So we have to think all of us, as participants, as organizers, we have to think deeply about this because these are affecting our lives.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: There are 10 million researchers worldwide. And as a result, the wider public, the entire world's population. So there are short term and long-term impacts that are at work. And we have to work and elaborate on this so that we can actually impact policy within scientific community and worldwide. We have talked about open science elements, of course, all of us, especially this esteemed audience.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: So open the manuscript, preprints, open access peer-reviewed articles. Open materials that we have been exchanging have been very valuable. So has been open code. So now it's very much time to think about open access conferences. And as other speakers pointed out, this has been on our minds for a long time.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: We finally were able to articulate it in published form last year, but it has been on our minds. And early career researchers are dealing with this constantly. They don't have access to research, and they don't have access to researchers. Some of our recommendations for what the new format and organization could include is that there are specific elements for promoting early career researchers.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: That deliberate fostering of interactions are very important from organizers. It's important to have the meeting statistics released. As you saw Tomislav pointed out that with these statistics, we can compare and actually have useful conclusions from the event. It's also important because when we did our first study, we had to look into 270 conferences.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: None of them had their information readily available. So it was very time consuming. It's very important that conferences mandate open access dissemination of the material. And we have seen this at virtual conferences. And it's important that researchers with disabilities can still attend and interact at virtual conferences, as some researchers may have financial challenges. And we think that it's important that organizers source sponsors locally or internationally.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: So to researchers, we really hope that they talk to the organizers of the conferences in their scientific society and really discuss these issues with them. So thank you very much for your time. I would like to thank Lori Carlin and other speakers. And it was an absolute pleasure to be here today and to talk to you. And we are very much looking forward to your questions in the Q&A session.
LORI CARLIN: Thank you all so much. This has been fantastic. As I said earlier, I've spoken to you all a few times and another of your authors, others of your colleagues who were also on this paper. And every time I speak to you folks, I learn some really valuable information. So thank you for sharing your time today. I welcome questions in the Q&A. We will start off, but we left plenty of time for discussion and questions.
LORI CARLIN: So please don't be shy. If we were in person, I'd have my roving mic and be going around the audience asking folks to participate. But I'll do the best I can in this virtual environment. I'm going to start off with I think a meaty question. We've been talking about conferences. But the dissemination of research obviously happens well beyond the conference environment.
LORI CARLIN: So are there other challenges or changes, I should say, because likely there are other challenges that you'd like to see in terms of dissemination and access to scholarly research in general? Thinking about preprints, open access, what is your thoughts on just the general dissemination of research information and the challenges you face or have faced and what your thoughts are on what would make things better?
LORI CARLIN: I know any one of you could talk about this. Any takers for first position? Humberto.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: I'd have to take that question. As a matter of fact, we have been experiencing for the last few years a shift in the form of real time scholar communications to a state where we have now the networking, like Twitter and microPublication, the elementation of frequency in the adoption of preprint servers, and a lot of innovation in peer review in terms of transparency and real time assessments of data.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: During the pandemic, there are also many, many initiatives dealing with things like outbreak science or other repositories. Some platform, some innovation instruments that have helped to assess the real time generation and evaluation of knowledge. In that sense, we have to start thinking about-- this is a personal view, about what is the real impact now about scholarly meetings and conference itself.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: We have said in our presentation that we are spending billions of dollars in these activities. Much of this industry has to do with traveling, hotels, convention centers, and many, many, many, many economical aspects of this enterprise. So one question that we are experiencing a lot of time is what we are getting out of all this money, because we have a lot of answers that has to do with anecdotal data and tangible responses.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: Many of them has to do with, oh, we really need is our informal meetings during the coffee break and our cocktails in their party. And on many things that had to do with flying away to an exotic place to join with a lot of colleagues and try to have something like an academic holidays. So I guess what I had to say is just we really have to think about just things in this new context. And we have to remember that the traveling flight and going to this in-person meetings, international meetings is a privilege.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: And we're leaving behind a lot of people when we choose to do these activities. We also have to think what these resources could be used for. I don't know if my answer had to do a lot with research communication, but that's something that I experience every day. Now I'm able to read almost the newest information in my field of research every day in the networks.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: And I think that in some aspects, international medias are starting to build a chronicle because before this real time sharing of academic outputs, the international meetings were a place where you discuss and publish results or things that you were experimenting right now when you're thinking about doing in the near future. So now, when we start to share the things as right as we make them, we have to really question ourselves what are we taking out of this.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: But please, any of the other panelists might have a different personal take on this. Thank you.
LORI CARLIN: Sarvenaz or Tomislav.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: Yeah, I would just like to extent on Humberto's answer and say that I think 2020 and 2021 was finally a year that we removed the stigma out of preprints. And maybe this is a path towards a time when finally journals will compete for manuscripts that they found online or on preprints and not vise versa. Because sometimes resubmitting and resubmitting and resubmitting takes so much valuable time out of research, researcher's pocket, which could be invested in research.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: And also, another positive thing is many studies with negative results can now be more easily published preprint servers, which then removes publication bias. So I think these are some positive developments. And this can be especially extended to the conferences. And I really echo Humberto's string about faster research dissemination. So when I was a Young Leader Circle of the American Society of Microbiology, we try to do a joint project with the European Society for Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases to make a Twitter conference on clinical microbiology.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: It was more like a course. And it had its success, but I think it was not the right time to try it. But I think now with all these changes and with the change of the viewpoint about Twitter, about other means of communicating science, I think we will have some positive progress in that regard Thank you.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: Yes, I agree completely with the panelists. I think that unfortunately without a pandemic, it seems that we weren't really actively going towards the direction of mass virtual conferencing. We noted two conferences, one in optics, the other in neuroscience, that were planned virtual in 2019 far ahead of the pandemic. But unfortunately, it wasn't very widespread, and it wasn't really going to be very widespread.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: It seems that unless the majority or all of the scientific community intends to do something, we won't actually achieve accelerated or wide-reaching change. I agree that the virtual conferences have really enabled sharing of materials, a lot of abstracts. A lot of attendees have recorded their talks or have them available on YouTube. I do think that the scientific community has relied on return form of communication for too long.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: And we are missing face time. I think for particularly early career researchers, they don't see other researchers talk or how they talk. And they can't be inspired really. And I think there's a big gap and missed opportunity in that. And I think virtual conferences really democratized access. As early career researchers, we really cherish this.
LORI CARLIN: Great. Thank you all. Those were great answers. We have a couple of interesting questions coming in on the chat. I'll start with the first one is, do you feel that hybrid conferences address all or most of your concerns versus in-person conferences? Or do you worry that individuals attending virtually when there is also an in-person component just won't get the same experience as attending in person?
LORI CARLIN: Whomever would like to start off here. Maybe Sarvenaz, do you want to take that one to start?
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: Yes. Thank you. I think that most of the conversation has been-- sometimes on social media, sometimes on other channels, has really been focused on, OK, the pandemic will be over, let's move to hybrid conferences. But I think there isn't a lot of thinking or planning really behind this conference. It's just there, it's just a plan at the moment. A hybrid conference, based on experience of some researchers in Germany that actually organized one in 2019, needs much more effort from the organizers if the intention is to have equitable conference that gives the benefits of presentation and networking to both types of attendees, in-person and virtual.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: We have referenced this, I believe, and I can leave the link to this wonderful conference that happened in Germany. It was hybrid. And basically researchers met locally, and the event was broadcasted internationally. And there may have been a networking element to this as well. But I wanted to just quickly mention that I think we don't have to necessarily translate in-person conferences to virtual format or hybrid format.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: We can actually decouple presentation and listening to science from networking. So networking can happen year long. Networking can happen in person or virtual and through dedicated online platforms that societies form or researchers or universities form. And presenting science or listening to science can happen once or twice a year in every discipline.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: And it can happen fully virtually. So there isn't really this mandate to literally translate in-person conferences to fully virtual or hybrid. It's completely feasible to have longer networking period and shorter, maybe one or two week, dissemination of research time.
LORI CARLIN: Yeah. Humberto or Tomislav, anything you want to add there?
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: If I can just add even in the paper, we proposed something that-- like to create local hubs that can be done virtually network with other local hubs in other cities. And I think this is also a good approach, how to tackle this issue. Even before COVID, there were some conferences organized as hybrid ones. And I attended one.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: I was in person, but there were hybrid individuals connected. And I think at least then, it highly depended on the organizer, how he will include those people that were virtually present. Will he read the questions? Will he include them in some other way? So this is also something that needs some guidelines because it's something that, as Sarvenaz said, it will take even more organizing effort than organize a full virtual conference.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: And this is something to take into account. And all the other things that we mentioned in the manuscript, of bringing people from far away places to do-- one place to have a conference and gather.
LORI CARLIN: Yeah, and it reminds me too, it takes rethinking, right? We're not necessarily talking about taking a conference that was in person and then mimicking it online. There are differences. There are pluses and minuses to both types. And it's an opportunity to take the pluses of an online environment and make something different that is also valuable as well.
LORI CARLIN: We've another question in the chat about Zoom fatigue or just being online fatigue. And the questioner was saying that their researchers are complaining about this aspect of online meetings and online learning. Any advice or thoughts on that? The fact that it can be more fatiguing to be virtual on the computer looking at and talking to people, watching talks.
LORI CARLIN: It can be harder to concentrate, to carve out that time in your day to say I am going to attend this or I am going to participate in this. Any thoughts around that?
HUMBERTO DEBAT: Well, I have read about some fatigue. There are many articles regarding that. We have all experienced fatigue of our meetings online or being online all the time. I have to say that what Sarvenaz mentioned before that something that doesn't happen chronically could have an impact on that. If you agree to do some meeting, but all the resources are uploaded to the net, like, I don't know, YouTube or et cetera, you are able to see those events whenever you want.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: And also about some of these very aspects, I don't know how to put this on. But for instance, there is a lot of concern I have read about some bombing. But at the same time, there are countries that are being bombed right now. So there is some kind of triviality when you put everything in perspective of what is the problem and what is not.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: I mean there are certain things that has to do with a lot of critiques about the virtual system that has to do a lot with things that could be minor or details or things that could be improved or worked on it. But you really have to think if that's a problem itself or just some things that you are not accustomed to or that you are really accustomed to something that which is the status quo of the last 100 years of meetings.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: And you are seeing a lot of things that you don't want to change. But well, anything. Perhaps my answer has to do with perspective, with seeing this in a broader way and thinking about the issues and things that people experience all over the world and could be a little bit more impactful or important in terms of accessibility, sustainability, inclusion, equity, or privilege.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: Thanks.
LORI CARLIN: Excellent.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: What I would add to that also is something that Sarvenaz briefly touched upon previously is that with virtual conferences, you don't need to stack everything in two or three days because you don't need to spend millions of renting a venue and inviting everybody in that huge venue. So you create a longer conference. And this is one of the steps how to avoid Zoom fatigue in the future. And the longer the conference will also provide more opportunity for more interaction, for more networking, and basically recreate all these events that we miss so dearly from in-person conferences, so to say.
LORI CARLIN: Absolutely. So moving on, we have another question about networking. And I know Tomislav, in particular, you did touch on this when you spoke about the European conferences that you organized. So I don't know if you want to start this one off. But really there is a lack of the ability to network as well. But then there are pluses. So you're not going to be bumping into somebody in the hall or sitting next to them accidentally or serendipitously at a session.
LORI CARLIN: But you did speak about a speed networking kind of thing where you have an opportunity to sit down in a room with folks that you may never be able to meet in person. Are there other ideas that you folks have for networking that work well, especially in a virtual environment? And Tomislav, I don't know if you want to start that one off?
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: Yeah, like I mentioned that example where you-- and I encountered this in one European and one US conference when they serendipitously just create those breakout sessions, breakout rooms. And then you have opportunity one on one or two to one to meet somebody who is well up in the field. That's how I met somebody from the Mayo Clinic that stop the infectious diseases, which I would not have had the opportunity before. But even before virtual conferencing took off really, we also tried to do some virtual networking especially when you enter some new program or some conference.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: You create the WhatsApp group, try to network there. This is something that can be translated to the virtual environment. It's not like we are completely unused to do it. It's just how to find the right venue and the right approach. And for now, this highly depends on the organizer. Like I said, some conferences will be great. Some just leave the attendants wandering in the dark, not knowing what to do, not knowing who is even attending the conference.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: But I think this is something that can be worked on and improved in the future.
LORI CARLIN: Great. Sarvenaz, did you want to add something there?
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: Yes, and I think we had discussed this before. This issue of networking was actually there before as well. Personally, I never found networking in person efficient. I do think that these events, as we also found out in our meta-research, are male-dominated conferences. Sciences, in fact. With just about 20% of professors are women, you hardly meet them at events.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: And even if you do, you may not actually interact with them. So people that knew each other would attend, and events would create exclusive parts where early career researchers wouldn't really be able to benefit from it. So I think this issue of networking was persistent and pre-existing. What a number of researchers have done for years is that they're networking over social platform, for example, Slack.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: I recently took leadership of one of these groups called Future PI Slack that I can share the link to. And this is a community of 4,000 post-doctoral fellows that aspire to continue their academic career towards professorship. We have been networking for four years. It's, of course, voluntary and whenever members have a chance. But they exchange information.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: They exchange resources. They discuss issues in their disciplines and in research culture. There are similar networks for early career professors called New PI Slack, and there is also one for graduate students called Grad Slack. There's also one for mid-career professors. So each of these have a few thousand members. And of course, this is a very small sample of the scientific community which has about 9, 10 million researchers.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: But it's a good example for how you can decouple dissemination of research from networking. And network at your own leisure, at your own time, and don't kind of lock down the science because you have to get a visa, find funds, and travel and exclude a lot of people to do that. I think this is the smart way to do it. Of course, I completely agree with what Tomislav suggested.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: And I think that networking is also possible at virtual conferences. I do think that scientific societies can do much more in this regard. I think that they have a great opportunity to connect researchers together over the year, not just once a year for five days.
LORI CARLIN: I think if we were in person right now and you could see the audience, I think all of them would have had their heads down. And they would be busy typing away or scribbling down all those networking groups that you just mentioned, Sarvenaz.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: I can share in the chat.
LORI CARLIN: I did. I put the Future PI Slack in the chat as well. So absolutely, those are great information. I'm also reminded-- so over the year that I've been engaging with you folks, I've spoken to authors of the paper who were able to be with us today. One of them is your colleague Fiona from Africa. And I remember Fiona telling me specifically that one of the benefits of having information available in this way was that even when she did go to a conference, she may have been the only one from her institution that was allowed to go.
LORI CARLIN: And she was busy networking and busy talking to people and didn't get to all the sessions she wanted to go to. Plus, some sessions are concurrent, and you can't be in multiple places at one time. And so having the information available when she got back to her institution to both refer to it herself, but also share it with her colleagues because oftentimes, that one person is not only tasked with going but with coming back and bringing information to their colleagues as well.
LORI CARLIN: And I think that that's an interesting point for our audience too, is the ability to even when you have an in-person conference, the ability to easily share some of that information too. I don't know if there's anything more you folks want to mention about that. But I remember talking specifically to Fiona about that issue.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: Yes, our colleagues actually in our conversation shared a lot of other issues that we couldn't include in the paper. There are personal, regional issues. There are barriers in terms of how much time they can take away from their job or who is going to provide the funds. And the funding system can be unfair towards early career researchers. So sparing US $2,000 to $4,000 for something like this that now we can't see can be easily shared mutually is not very sensible.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: Also, as you mentioned, the recordings are available because especially younger researchers or those who want to rewind and pay attention to things or attend the entire meeting, not parallel sessions, cannot do that very, very easily. This is very important, I think.
LORI CARLIN: Great. Thank you. All right, we just have a few more minutes left. So I'm going to close with a high level question here and ask each of you to weigh in on what you feel is the most important concept that we've been talking about today and what message would you like the attendees of the SSP meeting, who are sitting in on our session today or those who will listen to this at another time since this is being recorded and will be shared after the meeting.
LORI CARLIN: What message do you want them to walk away with from this session today? And who wants to go first? And Sarvenaz, I know you like to wrap up. I don't know if you want to go first or you want to go last in this--
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: Any order is fine.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: We will leave her to wrap up.
LORI CARLIN: OK, so Tomislav, you have the mic.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: Yeah, I would like to add something. So in the last year, one of the biggest buzzwords in the world was inclusion. And now, we have a perfect opportunity to make an inclusive society with these virtual conferences that will be more accessible by many researchers, more accessible by early career researchers. And so the inclusion would be the key concept that I would highlight from this perspective.
LORI CARLIN: Excellent. Humberto.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: Well, I agree with Tomislav that of course, that's a very important issue about trying to democratize this scientific sharing of information around the globe. And many think about Scientific Commons as a public good, which should be a right for every person to have access to information and to participate in scientific dialogue.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: So yeah, I totally agree about that. Then I have been reverberating about this question about really thinking about what we are getting out of all the resource we are spending in in-person meetings and try to rationalize that in the context of poverty, limited resource, and the reality that most researchers face around the globe that has very little attention in terms of what they are doing and what they can work in in this discussion.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: So yeah, inclusion is something that we really have to work on. And I think that during this year, we have learned that many, many, many things that we do in person we are able to do them remotely. And that has an important impact in terms of climate and carbon footprint. So also, that's another important aspect about equality.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: Of course, there are a lot of side effects of impacts in energy itself, et cetera. But equality brings on a lot of reduction, a very important reduction in terms of also economical expenses and also climate impacts. So that's two things that would like to say. Thank you for the invitation.
LORI CARLIN: And Sarvenaz.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: Yes, I really echo what my colleagues said. I think that-- I had three points to summarize, and I forgot the first one. Oh, OK, I remembered it. One common theme was that this is going to be like online teaching, this is going to be unlike running-- like running online running off a lab, this is going to be like online workspaces.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: And no, it's not sensible to conflate virtual conferences a couple of times a year with online teaching or online running off your lab or online workspaces. The second thing is that there are hundreds of thousands of researchers that are attending their first conference ever because it was virtual. And if you think of how in privileged nations we can't live without information and internet access on phone every second or without immediate access to an article or a preprint, then imagine how it would feel to attend a conference for the first time.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: I want this to sink in with the audience. And I think this is really important in terms of reframing scientific communication for years to come. And finally, I think that we have really underestimated how much our science can impact other researchers. I think we are in the dark ages of scientific communication. We have been.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: What we produce has been unheard of, has been unread. Our work is unexplored really. And we have been really not able to actually get the entire worth of our work out to the researchers and then have it benefit the public. So I think that virtual conferences are just the beginning of really enabling all researchers when they want to share science and really impact the world, as they should be with research funds.
LORI CARLIN: Thank you so much. That was great answers all of you and a wonderful wrap up. I have a few words of thanks, but I need to start with thanking all the three of you for giving your time. This is not part of your day job at all, and I so appreciate you being able to join us today and working on putting this presentation together with me. It's been a pleasure knowing all of you and bothering you over the last year at different times.
LORI CARLIN: I remember Humberto, I interviewed him for another project. And he apologized because he was busy giving COVID information, and his time was very limited. So I really thank our speakers today for participating. I hope you all found the session really informative and helpful thanks to SSP's annual meeting program committee and our generous sponsors. Be sure to check the interactive networking events, the marketplace gallery.
LORI CARLIN: A recording of the session will be available later today, I believe, and available through November. So you can come back and access if you missed anything. And again, thank you all for a great session today.
TOMISLAV MESTROVIC: Thank you.
HUMBERTO DEBAT: Thank you very much.
SARVENAZ SARABIPOUR: Thank you very much. Thank you.
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