The Real Gabinete Português de Leitura in Rio de Janeiro
In general, astronomers enjoy attending conferences. Particularly when they take place in nice locations. Rio de Janeiro, for instance, fits that bill nicely (thank you, IAU). Some of us even enjoy presenting our work to our colleagues at these events, be it by giving a talk or making a poster. It usually earns us a pat on the back from our peers, some useful feedback, new ideas and contacts, and more often than not a well-earned drink afterwards. Soon afterwards, emails start arriving from the conference organisers: send us your proceedings paper!
In one of last week’s editions of Estrela D’Alva, the daily IAU General Assembly newspaper, Rob Kennicutt, Professor at the University of Cambridge and recent co-laureate of the Gruber prize for cosmology, wrote an article on the boringness that is the conference proceedings paper. The full article can be read on page 2 of the online pdf edition of the paper. Kennicutt’s question:
Are printed proceedings another dinosaur that should become extinct along with printed journals, or do they offer something unique and precious that needs to be preserved?
Conference proceedings contain papers contributed by the speakers of the conference and are published in book or journal format. The big difference with a journal article is that proceedings papers are not peer-reviewed. Particularly at large conferences such as this general assembly, paper length is very limited – typicalle one or two A4 pages. As such, they offer a nice snapshot of what a researcher or group was working on at a particular time, rather than a comprehensive overview of work on a particular topic. While browsing proceedings of conferences past can give a good introduction to a topic and are of historic interest, they are rarely cited, quickly become outdated and left to collect dust on shelves.
Some organisations do now publish proceedings articles very rapidly online, but they are often only available to society members or at a price. This is prohibitive to younger researchers, for whom proceedings are the most valuable resource to begin with.
Considering all this, motivating researchers to deliver a nice paper on time can therefore be the bane of the conference organisers’ life for months after the event.
Kennicutt considers only the scenarios of paper proceedings, electronic proceedings, or no proceedings at all. But surely there are many alternative and innovative models that offer the best of both worlds: make the content available in an accessible way, without burdening the speakers with additional work? The internet is the perfect platform for such a model, and the slowness with which this has been adopted by organisations in astronomy and physics.
A few years ago I signed up for an online MBA Fair organised by The Economist, essentially an event to let prestigious MBA schools connect with potential applicants to their programs. MBA schools are big business, and this was obviously a well-sponsored event (I signed up more out of curiosity into the format rather than desire to study for an MBA). It was quite amazing. There was a virtual conference hall with stands from the different schools, which were represented graphically, like you were actually looking down at a big exhibition hall. Every stand was clickable, which would give you the opportunity to chat live with a representative of the school, download a brochure, or link to their website. There were several live seminars cast over the internet about career management, leadership and education, with the option of submitting a question in a chat window. The content remained available online after the event. It all worked swimmingly, circa 2006.
These things are possible. The infrastructure required to provide full online coverage of a large event is, I imagine, substantial, but organisers could generate more funds by charging a reduced conference fee for online participation, perhaps even on a pay-per-session basis. Such a scheme could be very attractive to researchers of all ages: to students with limited access to travel funds, professors with busy teaching or travel schedules, postdocs or junior faculty with young families. And how about women scientists on maternity leave? We talk so much about how to keep women in science careers, how to help them combine family and work. Online conference participation for them would be the perfect way of keeping up to date with the newest results in their field and prepare for returning to work without having to leave a young familiy behind.
I don’t even think it would reduce the number of “real-life” participants to the conferences.
Text is the least user-friendly way of supplying content on the internet. Any web designer can tell you that. Rather than convert printed proceedings into their online equivalent, the talks themselves can be made available online after the event, together with an abstract and speaker bio. The success of the talks from TED, made available online for free, is surely a sign that people will sit, watch and listen in their own time to content that interests them. Would this initiative have had the same success if TED made available 1-page papers of each talk?
Kennicutt’s questions about the value of conference proceedings in their current format are very valid. But rather than discuss the merits of “paper vs. electronic”, we should be moving to an entirely different approach to networking and conferences in science, using the internet as a platform for a more open and inclusive discussion with the whole community, not just those with the means to travel.
Image courtesy of Flickr user UnprobableView. If you’re an astronomer at the IAU, the Real Gabinete Portugues de Leitura library in central Rio is free for all and absolutely stunning, go take a look.
I’m in general agreement with all this.
One advantage of TED is that they select for good speakers, have strict rules on how to present and do a good job filming and editing the video. The chance of watching an interesting TED talks is fairly high as a result. In my experience, astronomy conferences don’t tend to select like that and many speakers don’t seem to be trying to communicate well. Given that, I suspect that most astronomy video talks would suffer the fate of their paper equivalents.
Yup that is very true. But there are also scientists who are excellent and persuasive speakers but terrible writers – so the current situation has a bias in favour of the good and/or prolific writers, and no one complains about that. Perhaps making every single conference talk available is not worth it, you’re right, but for invited reviews or plenaries it would make sense.
Perhaps also people would put more effort into their talk if they knew it would be recorded and made available online?
How about the IAU allowing electronic voting for all its resolutions, so members who cannot attend due to financial or family considerations still get a say on all agenda items?