 Welcome to May's ECR Wednesday webinar hosted by Eli, the series that aims to give early career researchers a platform to discuss important issues to you and your research career. Today's webinar focuses on what could be done to reform the conference experience for organisers and participants and your chair is Vinod. Over to you Vinod. Thank you Miranda. Hello everyone thanks for joining in today's early career researchers Wednesday webinar. My name is Vinod Arangoban. I'm a member of the early career advisory group and I will also moderate today's webinar. So just to give a quick word about our host of today Eli. Eli is a non-profit organisation that is operating a platform to improve all aspects of research communication by encouraging and recognising the most responsible behaviours in research. The role of early career advisory group is to influence and support Eli's work to catalyse broader forms in evaluation and communication of science and in particular to represent the needs and aspirations of researchers at early stages in their careers for a research culture that is healthy both for science and scientists. This webinar series ECR Wednesdays is just one such initiative that Eli has launched to help support the ECR community. So before we go into the webinar I would like you to remind you that we are recording this webinar and we'll make it available in YouTube later. So I request all of the participants who are joining both synchronously and asynchronously to be respectful, honest, inclusive, accommodating, appreciative, open to learning from everyone else. Currently do not attack, demean, disrupt, harass or threaten others or encourage such behaviours. Do not, if you feel uncomfortable or unwelcome at any of these webinars, please contact Eli by email which is eventsatelibesciences.org and this inbox is watched by Anya Stannis who is joining us from the back end. And the E-Life Organising Committee has the right to ask anyone to leave or deny access to subsequent webinars. So if you need any help during this webinar kindly you direct your messages to Anya or to Naomi who is working from the back end. For that I would like to actually welcome all our panellists today. So we have with us today Anit David from Swedish University of Agriculture Sciences, Umberta Debatt from the National Institute of Agriculture Technology in Argentina, Emily Leshan from the Code for Science and Society from the United States, Sarvina Sarabipur from Johns Hopkins University of the United States and Samantha Sia from European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Hamburg, Germany. Thank you all for joining us today. To set the background for why we started thinking about this particular topic, conferences, all of us, you know, practicing researchers or anyone who is in any academic area would be attending conferences and conferences are one way of sharing our current state of the art or any novel findings that we find from our research. Although conferences might serve as a platform for new discoveries, there are a lot of barriers for many researchers across the globe which has not been really carefully thought about. And currently due to the situation of COVID-19 and it took us one pandemic to realize that the structures that we have been operating in order to share knowledge is not equitable and there's a lot of barriers for several researchers across the globe. And if you look at the scientific endeavor or research in general, it's an endeavor that is carried out globally together by all communities participating in a very inclusive way so that we can push the boundaries of existing knowledge. But we exclude many demographic from sharing knowledge or participating in dialogue of improving knowledge around things. And for that particular reason, so we were also at the ECAG, the early career advisory group. We have thought beyond the pandemic and how conferences or cancelling conferences due to pandemic can cause several hindrances to research carriers of early career researchers. And one of the particular initiatives that we work in synergy with the E-Life ambassadors is actually transforming to this webinar. So most of the panelists today are members of the E-Life ambassadors and they've started this initiative almost around a year back thinking about how conferences are exclusionary. And Savrana Sarabipur has been leading this initiative and so that is available as a preprint. So their discussions have been like this is one of the research agents that has been under looked and they've kind of tried to collect data from different sources in order to really provide a data-driven approach to how conferences are exclusionary and what we can actually do to improve them. So you could find that preprint link somewhere so that will be posted in the chat or it's also in the Google doc. So before we move on to the panelists, before I open the floor to the panelists, I'd just like to let you know or remind you of certain logistics. So if you want to ask questions, please feel free to ask that using the Zoom chat. So we'll ask all the panelists to share their stories initially and then we will have some time for discussion which is probably 15 to 20 minutes. And then the questions come, I'll read out your name and then I will ask the questions. And in case if you are not able to ask those questions, we'll also copy that into the public notes document. And if you are uncomfortable asking questions through Zoom, you could also use the public document to ask questions and then if you would like to be contributed or if you'd like to be acknowledged for your contribution, please also save whether how to contact you and your name and so on. With that, I would now open the floor for the panelists. So one of the things that we've always been thinking about is how conferences are conducted and what it means to most of us. So in that there's like a lot of challenges and in particular there could be demographic challenges like traveling and so on. So I would like to call upon Annette David to present what are the challenges that researchers have been facing towards attending in-person conferences. And I would particularly like you to elaborate on the perspective of African scientists and their challenges. Annette, please. Yeah, thank you for the introduction, Vinod. So when it comes to the African perspective, one of the challenges of attending the conferences in the format they are right now is the cost to attending these conferences can be forbidding to many scientists from the continent as most of them they come from resource constrained settings. So one of the biggest sources of the cost is travel and accommodation costs. And unless we find travel grants, most of us cannot afford or our labs cannot afford to pay for us to attend conferences. So also sometimes we have to pay for the visa fees. And sometimes scientists ask you to cover their travel and accommodation costs only to be refunded later, which is also another complicated process. And as a result, many scientists cannot afford to go to these conferences and they're excluded from the process. So our contribution, our voices are missing from the global scientific or from the world scientific picture. Another challenge that we as African scientists face is the process to get the visa to look at the screen now. Some countries are very lucky in their residence can travel to many destinations without requiring a visa or they get a visa on arrival. But many countries, especially in some countries in Africa, including my country, we don't have visa on arrival or we don't have visa free entry to other places in the world. And many conferences are hosted either in Europe or North America. And the process to get a visa into these countries is cumbersome. Apart from being expensive, it's cumbersome and the rejection rate is quite high. And some of the reasons which are cited like a scientist does not have a stable base at home, maybe they don't have a family, so maybe they will not come back or they don't have a stable income or they don't have a stable job. So it's probably being a scientist and have an invitation later. But still there are always there is always a reason to deny a visa entry to certain countries. And this also causes a lot of emotional trauma. You go through the process, you pay all the fees and you have to book accommodation in advance and then only to be rejected. And it's documented systemic exclusion of scientists from certain African countries. And this problem can be aggravated by political issues. And also Malia, they have been in a list of banned countries to go to places like the US and other developed countries follow suit. If you say these residents from these countries are not welcome in the US, for example, so other developed nations will follow suit. So issues like natural disasters, political situations or health concerns like the one we have now or Ebola, makes it a bit more difficult for scientists from African countries to get entry into places where conferences are hosted. And many conferences are not hosted in our countries, in Africa anyway. So we always have to travel to other places. So I think having digital meetings, going into digital meetings, digital conferences may be beneficial. It may be make sure more scientists from the continent participate in academic conferences. So it's digital conferences in a different form. They can be virtual, they can be semi-virtual. It may be easier for more people to access them. It may be easier to have a diverse group of participants. And if done correctly, it will be more inclusive. So for people who have had kids recently, they may not be able to travel very easily. They're much more affordable. They're much more flexible for researchers. If you feature things like recorded talks, which somebody can watch at their own convenient times, it's more flexible for people to attend. But also, they save money. So there are many advantages to digital conferences. Another alternative which we explored is having semi-virtual multi-location conferences or academic meetings where scientists meet from at a hub in a region or in a country or the academic institution or such institute and they connect to other scientists globally. So we have like a wheel and spoke more, they can network locally, but they can network with other scientists in the world. So if we try to find ways to make digital conferences viable and try to find ways around the problems like internet bandwidth or time zones or try to have fewer bigger meetings in rotations, I think we can have meetings which are more impactful, effective, inclusive and yeah, more diverse. So that is what I would say in my perspective on African scientists. Yeah, thank you Annette for that nice introduction into how conferences are really exclusive. And now that if you are for a person like me who might not have the similar issues that Annette had already pointed out, you would probably be able to get visas and then maybe be able to travel and maybe able to get some funding for attending the conferences. But when you travel, there's also a lot of damage that we do to the environment and so on. So we should also probably be mindful about what we can do in order to protect the environment. Maybe it's a bit too late, but as scientists we always wanted to improve the world around us and in that respect I would like to invite Samantha Sia to answer this particular question about what environmental impacts do in-person conferences have and have they implemented or have the organizers of different conferences implemented any green strategies in today's organizations. And so I would also like to ask Samantha this question about how do you think a switch to predominantly holding virtual conferences will reduce research or carbon footprint. Samantha, please. Hi, thanks Minut. Yep, so I'm Samantha and I think the largest environmental impact of conferences comes from air travel. So aviation is a huge contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and thus to global warming. So just think about the fact that the single return journey from London to Perth as you can see on the map, it generates approximately 3.47 tonnes of CO2 and this is already 36% of the per capita emissions of average person from the UK. But these 3.47 tonnes are already more than the per capita emissions in 109 other countries which you can see shaded and brown in the map. Now think about the fact that this is for a single scientist going to a single conference. A mid-sized conference with hundreds of thousands of people would be responsible for a massive amount of emissions. So the total carbon footprint from a single annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience which has 31,000 attendees is actually equivalent to the annual carbon footprint of a thousand median size laboratories. This is no small feat because the electricity used from a single minus 80 freezer is already equivalent to that from a single family household in the UK. And if you look at it from the institute's perspective, air travel for business which is largely air travel for conferences actually forms a huge proportion of any institute's carbon emissions. So for example if we look at EPFL in Switzerland 31% of their emissions actually comes from air travel for business and this really illustrates the sheer impact of air travel in scientific society. Of course there are other problems with in-person conferences other environmental issues. So conferences also produce huge amounts of waste in the form of you know merchandise program booklets as well as disposable containers for food drinks and so on. And of the 6% of conferences in our database that have the sustainability policies most have begun to tackle these issues. So many speak about minimizing waste, encouraging recycling and so on. I mean for example you see that many conferences are switching to online program booklets which are more sustainable and can also be more user-friendly than traditional program booklets. I've also noticed that conference organizers are slowly moving towards serving more vegetarian, more vegan food as well as more locally sourced food while trying to avoid the use of disposable coloring. These are all very good first steps to raise awareness about these issues but arguably they don't really tackle the bulk of the environmental impact of conferences which comes from travel. So regarding travel some conferences with sustainability policies actually offset what they term as unavoidable travel which I think is a nice gesture. I mean it acknowledges the fact that travel generates a lot of admissions but I mean quite frankly I'm not entirely convinced by the value of offsets and I think it would make more sense for organizers and institutions to encourage a switch to more sustainable travel methods. I mean this is this can be quite challenging because the aviation industry is fairly heavily subsidized so this means that flight tickets can often be disproportionately cheaper than more sustainable alternatives. So of course institutions must somehow cater for this rather than just merely subsidizing the cheapest travel option. For example they could consider you know financially including the environmental impact of air travel by imposing a flight tax or you know you can set other types of restrictions for example for minimum distance so you could introduce a policy that says that travel that can be done within five hours by train must be done by train rather than by plane. But a big problem is that flying is pretty much the only reasonable way to cross oceans. So a solution to this is to have multi-location conferences as NF mentioned so you would have kind of hubs located in different continents. This minimizes the distances that participants and speakers would have to travel while still providing in-person interactions with regional colleagues. However this solution is not entirely equitable because probably the locations chosen would be in existing research hubs and would continue to exclude our colleagues from the global south and from asia and the pacific and so on. So a better solution would actually be to move away from the need to travel altogether by having fully virtual conferences. So these not only eliminate travel related emissions but also make conferences much more accessible to many people. So for example those who have disabilities those who have caregiving responsibilities to those who struggle to obtain visas to those who just may not have the funding to fly across the world for a conference and so on. I'm from Singapore originally and Singapore is geographically distant from many of the big prestigious conferences in Europe and in the US and you have to fly 12 hours to Europe or 18 hours to the US. And to do this just for a three-day conference it's terrible for the environment, it's physically and mentally tiring, it's also ridiculously expensive. And you know as as mentioned very few ECRs can financially afford to frequently fly across half the world. So I believe that the pandemic has you know given many organizers that extra push to change how conferences are carried out. Of course you know there have been many teasing problems in trying to establish virtual conferences in this time but I think that this is a great time to figure out the problems and to work to fix them. And well I'm quite hopeful because I think that the lessons that have been learned in this time will really advance our move towards more sustainable and more equitable conferences and yeah I'm pretty much very excited to see where we go from here. Thank you very much Samantha that was really very mind-opening and now that we have known of what impacts or environmental impacts are there while attending an in-person conference by flying across the continents. I would now like to call upon Umberto de Bat to present his views on what he thinks a better shift to predominantly holding virtual conferences will impact the academic academics globally and also particularly from the Latin American perspective where you know there's like a close-knit Latin American communities or scientific communities where you can kind of hold local conferences as they have been discussing about and how that can kind of translate into providing a global participation in the knowledge base. Thank you for the invitation. The short time for virtual conference will allow researchers of Latin America and other developing regions to participate in scientific dialogue at international meetings which is something we are being excluded from. There are multiple factors rendering and marginalization of Latin America in terms of participation in scholar communications during scholar meetings. I'm going to give some quick context about our region regarding inequalities in technology, infrastructure, research and development spending, grant fellowships and salaries. Latin America consists of 20 countries, 30 percent of the earth's land surface area with a population of over 652 million people. That's actually 8.5 percent of the world population, but we have 3.6 percent of global researchers, 0.3 percent of global patents, 3.4 percent of global spending and research and only 5.5 percent of global scientific publications. Some chronic issues of the region in R&D are limited access to grant opportunities in educated badges, substandard levels of laboratory infrastructure and equipment, the high cost and limited supply of reagents, inadequate salaries and jumping security of scientists. For instance, R&D spending as percentage of the GDP in South America is low. It goes from 0.0.5 in Trinidad Tobago to 1.24 percent in Brazil in contrast to OECD countries with an average of 2.4 percent. Another indicator are researchers per million people which goes from 14 in Guatemala to less than 1,200 in Argentina in contrast to OECD average which is 4,000. We have tremendous disparities within the region in terms of poverty, access to health and services and unemployment. All in all, Latin America is the region with the highest level of income inequality in the world. To end this list with a positive note, Latin America has one of the highest share of women researchers, 44 percent which in contrast to the 28 percent of the world average is equated. In this slide you can see what we found out regarding estimated money spent on 270 conferences but that's just the tip of the iceberg. I already illustrated in a study entitled the significance of meetings to the U.S. economy which estimates that 200 million people attend nearly 1.8 million meetings in the U.S. in 2009. Those meetings aggregated as the mines industry which is meetings, incentive conferences and events that generated 263 billion dollars in direct spending. 28 percent which is 73 millions is calculated to be spent on congress, conference and conventions. And with that huge amount of money there wasn't a specific it and that got my attention. Recreation and enter timing stands for 6 billion dollars. I'm going to repeat that. 6 billion dollars in recreation and earning timing. That figure alone is equivalent to our country complete yearly budget on R&D or 15 times the R&D budget of Peru or 25 times the one from Muiruwai. So as a region where two thirds of the investment and funding for research and development comes directly from public funds, financial support of research is not only an economical issue but also an ethical one. So there is some evidence that the international scholar in the media landscape has been caught by the mice industry. A highly profitable business. The anachronic and unsustainable traditional conference barding evolved in an era before mass communication and global connectivity. When it was necessary to travel in order to meet and present to peers academic results, the big question is what are we getting today out of this huge amount of money? I will try to describe this tension to the equivalent of scholarly publishing and the role of global sales in scholarly communications. We have experienced the long but sustained shift of scholarly communication as a market with extreme profits due to the peculiarity of the economic of scholarly publishing and neolithic quality from academic publishers in the digital era where the top five most prolific commercial publishers combined account for more than 50% of all journal articles. On the other hand, Latin America has created and maintains a non-commercial structure where scientific publications belongs to the academic institution and not to large public where knowledge is managed as a commons by the scholarly community that is not by a state or market but by a community of users that self-covers them. The scholarly communication not outsourced to commercial publishers has rendered a fiver of an access ecosystem to Latin America. The region has long tradition of regional information network to provide open access to its research results. In the absence of commercial academic publisher which is the mobile prevailing in developing regions, free publishing and distribution of scientific and academic publications has been the norm. So this academic led and non-for-profit model has been a natural form of scientific communication for over two decades in Latin America. Returning to scientific meetings we should ask ourselves about the public role of scientific conference and knowledge in our societies. I believe that this particular scholarly communications model could be rapidly implementing like a virtual conference enable inclusive dialogue oriented to advance subsides into the quality of human life. This shift will contribute to the democratization of production and access to knowledge necessary for the development of our society. A regional meeting but for European or North American research institution is an affordable for developing region institution. In faced academic meeting as a kind of conference tourism are living behind a multitude of diverse insights from researcher from blessed privileged regions. All in all every time that we are asked whether we prefer in person versus virtual meeting we should remember that that is only a choice for a limited privileged share of researchers. Besides anecdotal social networking and informal meets there are not many tangible outputs returning us long term benefits to the global research community and the society it serves. I believe that we should promote inclusive and participatory meetings under the umbrella of access to knowledge as a human right and its management as a commos by the scholarly community in a context of diverse multiple gen wine and participatory dialogue we may sustain through democratization of knowledge. Thank you. Thank you Umberto. That was really profound about democratizing knowledge as a right. So that leads to me to know you know think about how we can democratize in the current situation and how you know that we can put that in a or improve that in a better way. For that up next is Emily Lisak. I would like to invite Emily's and so Emily has experience organizing a lot of virtual conferences and so I'd like to ask what's your experience attending and organizing virtual conferences so far and what do you think we can improve upon that Emily please. All right thank you for the introduction and I just want to make one clarification. I don't have experience organizing virtual conferences but I have attended quite a few. I'll talk a little bit about my role. So I'm the conference fund manager at Code for Science and Society and this is a nonprofit based in the United States that provides fiscal sponsorship and project management support for research driven open data science projects and I'm leading a new initiative there to create a funding mechanism to fund conferences and events and research driven open data science and due to current global situation our first request for proposals will be for entirely virtual meetings. So what I'll be talking about today is based on what I have learned about virtual meetings from attending them myself and from talking to conference organizers and in conversations that I have that I've had about taking best practices and in-person conference planning and translating that to a virtual platform and I'll end today with how virtual meetings have potential to particularly benefit the early researcher community. So the Scientific Workforce has had to learn how to maintain productivity at a distance from labs offices field sites and colleagues. Over the last few months we've had to learn how to access our information and tools remotely and rely on online platforms for communicating with lab members students and collaborators. Most of us haven't received formal training and remote work and communication strategies so this transition has certainly been a learning process. One of the areas of science has been dramatically impacted is the scientific meeting. As scientists we value opportunities to interact with our colleagues to share research build our skills and launch new collaborations and these occasions are highly valuable opportunities for the early career researcher or ECR community to showcase their work and make connections that can help them advance the next career stage. These meetings may also provide opportunities for ECRs to engage in workshops focused on science communication, peer review and career planning that are not available at their home institutions. So because of the value that's placed on these gatherings scientific societies and conference organizers have been reluctant to cancel scheduled meetings and instead have gone through great lengths to quickly pivot to online formats to continue to meet the needs of their members. We've seen local national and international meetings and workshops convert to virtual formats in just a matter of weeks with great success and we've learned a lot from this first wave of virtual events. The most important lesson is that virtual meetings can be done and they can be done well. Conference organizers can no longer to traditional practices which can be exclusive to participants who may already feel marginalized in their communities rather we're at a turning point at which organizers can be proactive about innovating practices and working toward inclusivity. So today I'll share with you some challenges in planning meetings how we can turn these challenges into opportunities and how the ECR community in particular can benefit from the transition to virtual meetings. So as the preprint pointed out virtual meeting planning presents many of the same challenges as in-person meeting planning and one of these challenges is accessibility. So how can conference planners ensure that everyone who wants to participate can to the fullest possible extent. I encourage conference planners to arrange for sign language interpretation and or close captioning as one means of accommodation and also consider providing opportunities for participants to engage not only over video conferencing but also through written communication. So for example over Slack or shared Google docs to take into account different communication preferences and allow for conversations to extend over a longer period of time. Consider how to engage participants from different time zones and allow opportunities for asynchronous viewing of presentations and participation. For example the bioinformatics community conference which will be held virtually for the first time this summer will create schedules for both the Eastern and Western time zones to allow for equitable global participation. Moving to a virtual format improves accessibility for members of the scientific community who cannot easily travel such as government scientists caregivers and ECRs. Members of these groups may already feel marginalized in their scientific communities and the difficulty of having to travel to meetings can exacerbate these sentiments. By hosting meetings online all participants with internet access can have a level playing field with regard to participation and have their voices heard. The huge spikes and numbers of attendees at virtual events as compared to in-person meetings demonstrate that there are barriers to participation when they're alleviated the number and likely the diversity of attendees grows. Another challenge facing meeting planners concerns building and sustaining connections among participants. In-person meetings tend to have plenty of opportunities for informal networking and socializing during poster sessions or at meal times that can be difficult to replicate in virtual space. However there is variability in the extent to which all participants can partake in these socializing opportunities. So caregivers for example their downtime is often devoted to kids and families and for ECRs particularly those traveling to a meeting alone these times in the schedule can be awkward and intimidating. Interacting in virtual space with attendees either synchronously or asynchronously allows participants to engage in communication at times when it's convenient to do so and can lower the barrier for individuals who are newer to the community. One of the challenges of interacting virtual space is being able to replicate the warm fuzzy feeling that in-person meetings can create when participants are in an immersive experience for an extended length of time. But it is important to point out that meetings can also generate stress and anxiety in participants particularly those who may already feel marginalized and that it is possible to create meaningful connections using virtual platforms. Here I think ECRs are in a position of privilege because we are by and large just as comfortable communicating and community building online as you may be in person if not more so. We engage regularly in slack communities such as future PI friends of Joe's big idea and scientific society leadership teams and though we may have never met our colleagues in these spaces in person we feel comfortable sharing career advice peer editing and collaborating on projects. So with both in-person and online meetings participants either hop on a plane or close their video conferencing window at the end and there tends to be little follow-up afterward. I encourage conference organizers to think about ways of engaging participants through more long-term avenues such as slack communities that can sustain conversations and connections. And I also strongly encourage the use of digital archiving of toxin posters that attendees can provide feedback and ask questions after the event is over. Another challenge facing virtual conference organizers has to do with technology including what platforms to choose for the event and solving technical challenges that arise with speakers and participants. However in-person meetings also have a strong reliance on technology including AV systems online programs and archiving services. Successful virtual conference organizers take the time to practice talks with speakers in advance to make sure that there are no issues or questions associated with the technology. And I also encourage conference organizers to have a dedicated tech support team in place to handle issues that arise in much the same way that in-person meetings have volunteers or staff on site to help presenters load talks and to troubleshoot AV problems. The last challenge that I'll touch on has to do with creating and enforcing a code of conduct. While codes of conduct are becoming more common and expected they may largely be written with in-person gatherings and interactions in mind. So conference organizers need to ensure that they have codes of conduct with clear guidelines for reporting that extend to interactions in virtual spaces. Scientific meetings have become critical to advancing our careers. We need to show advisors, committees, and funders how we've disseminated our research to broad audiences. However accessing traditional in-person meetings is costly and time consuming and this is amplified for ECRs with families or caregiving responsibilities and those living in remote regions. Switching to a virtual platform increases access to these populations and may increase the abilities of ECRs as a whole to engage with other participants and to disseminate their work. As a community ECRs are at an advantage because we are accustomed to learning new technology and are comfortable interacting in virtual space. So I encourage ECRs who have the capacity to volunteer to be on conference planning committees so that you can get an inside view of the process and use your voice to advocate for meaningful change. And if you're not able to access the lab or your field site this summer I recommend that you look into the wealth of online training sessions and workshops that are surfacing focused on the development of professional and technical skills. If there's a training or engagement gap at your institution or within your scientific community that can be filled through a virtual conference or workshop I encourage you if you have the time to collaborate with others to organize your own virtual event. Bear in mind that virtual events still cost money and take time to plan but they do avoid many of the financial and logistical challenges of in-person events such as booking a venue and a caterer. So this format can open up opportunities for new or emerging conference organizers and events. So I encourage you to apply your creativity innovation and technological know-how to this emerging area and advocate for practices and values that promote equity and inclusion. And again if you're interested in getting involved in conference planning Code for Science and Society will be releasing a call for proposals this summer for virtual events that are centered on tools practices and communities and open data science that drives scholarship. And we're particularly keen to support organizers who aim to increase inclusivity and broaden participation in data science. Thank you very much Emily. That was really insightful. Now that I've also been attracting the questions so maybe now it's the time to really reveal the trump card of this webinar. So I'd like to invite Serbina Saravikpur to address the questions on what improvements can be implemented in the virtual mode for benefits of both attendees and speakers. And you know apart from that in particular if you can touch upon what role should the funders and the scientific societies have in redesigning the scholarly meetings. Should these virtual conferences be more inclusive of researchers of you know career stages geographies and so on. So I would like Serbina to address these questions. Serbina please. Hi. Thank you for all the wonderful discussions. It's going to be really hard to match those. So I will start with institutions and I think that as was briefly mentioned by our panelists of course institutions can reduce air based travel and invest and support more of the ground based and multi site conferences and this could be easier in terms of accessibility as well. And of course there's always a need in some institutions to invest in digital set up conference rooms and audio visual facilities and they can have long term benefits not just for this meeting. Now in terms of funders funders can do a lot and we think that there are policy changes that needs to be made that support low carbon careers. So these are basically mandates that acknowledge and encourage participation in virtual conferences and acknowledge those abstracts and those involvements and actually incentivize this organizing virtual conferences. We also realize that this is a topic that is very important to me. We examined inclusivity in terms of gender and also career stage and as you can see in our visuals we found that most conferences are not very inclusive and this equity and inclusivity has to come in the planning of the conference and will provide fair opportunities for everyone. We found that many conferences most don't have a statement on gender balance and majority don't have a diversity statement and even when they do the quality varies greatly. So funders have mandates and incentives for diversity and inclusivity and I think that they need to expand those and actually hold conferences accountable for their statistics. We also think that conferences have to release the statistics of their attendees and their speakers. We found that the positions of conference chair session chairs many of the invited speakers there is no equity in those and we think that conference organizers can take much better use of online lists of women and LGBTQI scientists that are available. PIs can actually recommend their trainees, their female trainees to go and speak in their place virtually or if multi-site in person and we also think that in terms of career stage there is a lot to be done. We found that there aren't a lot of networking opportunities for ECRs even in in-person conferences that we examined and we think that these have to be really concerted efforts. These shouldn't be meetings by chance and serendipitous meetings that scientists would like to have sometimes. So there are apps of course that organizers of virtual conferences can use and have been using and these apps allow attendees to interact. Of course Slack was mentioned which is also great and also some new conferences have used matching algorithms to facilitate chatting between attendees and speakers of similar interests. And finally we do think that there is a lot to be done in terms of providing training for ECRs and this has to do with the number and quality of the workshops that were offered in in-person conferences and we think that they weren't sufficient and they could dramatically improve. So during after before conferences, virtual conferences, there could be much better workshops that cater to the needs of ECRs at this time at this year in this decade. We also hope that PIs and organizers help sponsor ECRs. They could cut longer talks to have shorter talks and many more ECRs chairing the sessions, speaking of course in the sessions and also having a chance to interact virtually and these virtual interactions can actually be much less intimidating than approaching established a scholar in person. So basically we think that accessibility is an issue and having easier access to conferences via virtual mode will solve some of the inclusivity issues but not all there has to be concerted efforts in this regard. Thank you. Thank you Sabi. That was really awesome. I hope there are a lot of questions and some of the questions have been already answered during the discussion but now that I need to just go back and look into that I will you know bring the questions in but meanwhile I would like to thank all the panelists for providing their wonderful insights into how we can improve or actually reform conferences. So hopefully you all got a nice idea about what to do and there are several questions so I will try to go over there but before that if you have any questions please type in the zoom chat. I'm very sorry I've been muted so thank you very much Sabi for this excellent talk and I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all the panelists for bringing their wonderful insights and reforming conferences so that's really great. So I'd like to remind that now we will put all the questions to the panelists. There are a lot of interactions that have been happening so I'll try to you know scan through them and then go one by one but in the meanwhile if you want to ask any question please I'll chat or you could also post your questions in the Google doc or the public document and you could also use ECR Wednesday hashtag using Eli's community in the in true Twitter so now I will just go into the questions so I'm just scanning through so you know maybe like one of the questions that was reflecting on a few of the questions asked by maybe Emmanuel, Reina and also Norman so I would just you know I don't want to read all the questions but maybe I'll just paraphrase that question and then let's see if anyone any of the panelists wants to answer maybe if I had to like shorten it it's which do you think is the pervasive constraints preventing scientific conferences reform to Sarvi do you want to go on that? Yes sure so I do think that a change of culture and thinking is definitely required we need to be rethinking how we are organizing these conferences and this needs to happen at the researcher stage at the organizers stage institutional stage and of course funders and everyone can help with that I really my thoughts resonate with what Emily mentioned which is we don't need to wait for scientific societies to organize conferences for us we can actually get together as researchers in our own fields and start organizing this so these inhibitions and barriers can really be removed if we if we think and restructure these meetings there are of course obvious incentives to to travel as was mentioned by Samantha but virtual conferences are much more time efficient and they bring a larger diversity of ideas and diversity brings excellence so we have all the incentives to to to go and hold these virtually mostly virtually if not for four years to come is there any other panelists do they want to add on it or then I will just go to the next question so maybe I can ask the question from Sami maybe this is for Emily what was your best virtual conference experience is there any case where you thought that all worked well and was supportive in terms of communication community building and so on yeah that's a great question so I can think of two that I went to recently one was the lead dev meeting which is focused on engineering and another was cmx global which is focused on community managers and those are both very large meetings but what was great about them is that everything ran smoothly they're very professionally run and you could tell that the organizers took a lot of time in advance to make sure that to the best of their ability that there were not going to be technological issues that the transition would run smoothly there are very clear instructions and guidelines for participants to be able to navigate the different platforms that were used and what I liked in particular about the lead dev meeting is that there is a slack channel that's associated with it and so it's possible to continue conversations once the meeting is over and to continue to engage participants and they still have fairly regular programming for the folks who went to that meeting so it's possible to build community there kind of in general some of the best things I've seen from virtual conference planning is making sure that the time is put in ahead of time to make sure that the technology works and the speakers know how to use it and also again making sure there's clear instructions and guidelines for participating and also the use of digital archiving so that the presentations and the materials can be made available afterward for people to continue to use the material and ask questions and interact with it. Thank you Emily. Selvi did you want to add on that? Yes and just to add on what Emily said with recorded archives you can actually attend the entire conference unlike the in-person conferences which have hundreds of sessions running in parallel and you barely have the chance to attend a few during the day you can watch the entire conference at your own time zone when you want and you can also attend tens of conferences a year which weren't really possible so the democratization of knowledge and accessibility are just phenomenal for the entire research community. I think related to that there's another question from Frank so we are hearing a lot about zoom fatigue a three-day set of virtual conference sessions being more than how people can bear. Do anyone want to answer that or maybe Samantha? I mean yeah definitely I think zoom fatigue is a thing but I think it's up to the conference organizers to figure out how to space out the talks and the interactions such that it would kind of resemble a real-life conference if that's what you want to do and in that way I mean I don't think it would exhaust people very much more than a three-day conference in real-life would but I think another important point that has also been made by Selvi for example is that having virtual conference sessions really gives us the opportunity to archive the material and to make it accessible for people over a longer period of time and then people can go back and watch the talks and also interact at a later date and I think this is also very important because it gives it kind of ensures that the the viewers themselves are able to space out what the information that they receive from the computer so I could imagine that this would help people who suffer from zoom fatigue you know that they could make a choice to say you know what I'm going to watch this over a week or two weeks rather than in one three-day stretch and there you know that the conversations would take place over a longer time and they will be more sustained and I think this also feeds into the networking you know how to build networks with other people online I think this would all generally help while trying to reduce the amount of fatigue that people are experiencing just by spending all-day watching talks Yeah thanks a lot Samantha I think this one Serbia in the interest of time I just wanted to focus on one of the most important question which is from Mary Rose Frankel she had asked sharing results before publication is a valuable function of scientific conferences and how do you address speakers hesitancy in sharing unpublished results in an open forum like virtual or recorded webinars um Pumbato do you want to go on that well okay one aspect of public sharing of scientific results could be solved with the use of preference we are using preference to to communicate in real time our discoveries and results and to discuss them as a community of scholars in fact we have taken back control when we put that online and when we enable discussions of scientific results so there is a lot of preliminary dialogue in scientific conference but I don't think it could be replaced by other platforms and infrastructures which have been developing with great strengths as open store broad community services thank you for that um so I think there's also some related question that was asked by just scanning through questions because there's like a lot of a bit of redundancy with the questions so I'm just trying to rephrase them um well there's another one which is asked by many people actually including um Emmanuel Reynard there you know if you can get away with scientific conferences at all what had happened to the you know the sponsors and so on and how would they interact and how that would financially feedback and forth um so I I'd like to ask um any of the panelists to jump into that I can talk about sponsorship um so with our call for proposals um that we'll be releasing this summer for virtual events um we are encouraging applicants to budget for things like um professional closed captioning sign language interpreters um community organizers um professional tech support so these types of resources that will increase accessibility and broaden participation um these would be some of the things that um sponsors could cover um if there is a um a registration fee um then sponsors could cover or could waive um registration fees um particularly for those groups that are traditionally underrepresented in the community um so those are some of the ideas that we're thinking about um thanks for that um so I'm looking into the next question so maybe I'll like to call upon Annette for answering this question maybe um so so Sundar asks in current day conferences younger researchers rarely get to meet and talk to more established scientists and discuss their work and he understands that it's hard given the number of people attending the conferences do you think virtual conferences will improve this or will it even make worse um yeah so thank you for the question I think virtual conferences they're not a magic bullet for all the challenges of our academic conferences I think there is still a lot of work that is needed around planning so to make sure we avoid the same issues that come with the fiscal conferences and I think there are already explorations and ideas on how to make networking more effective and as she's mentioned some people are not very comfortable to reaching out to people face to face and trying to network and connect to them so the ideas which people have been exploring on connections or connections based on algorithms but also trying to use channels like Slack or Twitter which have platforms which already exist for communication for networking that we really try to look for ways to make networking effective it may be possible to find meaningful connection among participants especially LA career scientists and it's much easier to reach out to somebody by text or by tweet than going to introduce yourself high I'm so and so in a physical conference actually myself I haven't done that before in a physical conference or workshop so I think there is an opportunity here to make networking more inclusive even yeah thanks for that well we have many questions but we are almost at the top of the hour so I would like to kind of close the session by maybe you know asking a question for myself how do I see conferences in the next 10 years and or you know if any of the panelists wants to jump on this feel free feel free to do that but yeah in the interest of time I'll just try and close it by saying that you know for the future conferences need to be more inclusive effective you know in terms of structure and engagement and also environmentally sustainable and also sustainable for the researchers and the research culture in general so that is where I see the future and this particular webinar or you know all the discussions that surrounding us is a starting point or or you know something to break the ice and then to go deeper so I hope we will be able to reform this and I think it's time that we change or we value things that are different and improve our research culture around us but that I'd like to thank all the panelists and all the questions all the participants for bringing in very fantastic discussion so all the questions will be recorded in the live document and we would encourage you to keep asking questions and discussing this using easier density hashtag over Twitter and with that I'd like to thank again all the panelists and participants for joining in this webinar and before closing I would also like to let you know that there is the next webinar will be on 24th June about intersectionality which again is something that is closely related so this is going to feed back and forth on how we can improve very inclusive participation in the in the platform of knowledge production so kindly register for us and then keep the discussion going on but this is the official end of the webinar but that doesn't let anyone stop the discussions so please keep discussing this and using easier density hashtag and our panelists will get you their as in the now personal capacities permit thank you everyone for joining stay at home and have a nice day or evening or better where you're from thank you thank you yeah thank you