The usefulness of scientific conferences in the 21st century

History of Scientific Conferences

The development of scientific conferences has been a constant in scientific history since the emergence of the first Philosophy universities.

While initially based on long lectures in enormous halls where the most prominent figures in the field of study gathered, today they constitute an academic and social event that sometimes falls far short of fostering proactive and respectful debate among leaders in the field. Any opinion that deviates from what is politically and scientifically accepted is subject to censorship, cancellation, and ridicule.

The True Objective of Participating in Scientific Conferences Today

Furthermore, their goal is often to train young researchers struggling for stable employment. These researchers are subject to public scrutiny every time they give a talk, in order to obtain a certificate that, vaguely, will help them improve their scientific resumes in an increasingly competitive world. And those who innovate in their discourse face out-of-context criticism that pigeonholes them into a certain political spectrum. Because yes: today, disagreeing with politically correct opinions can be quite damaging, as science depends on public or private funding, affiliated with one side or the other of the current political system.

Is it worth the financial outlay?

Well, in my experience, despite all the risks mentioned above, yes. I have secured collaborations during my PhD that have led me to pursue a postdoc abroad; however, this has not been the case with all the colleagues I have met, and in fact, only a minority have managed to take advantage of the networking opportunities offered by conferences.

Why are conferences losing their spirit and how can we recover it?

Our attention span has diminished over time; self-censorship deprives us of a dynamic scientific debate in the Q&A sessions afterward, where almost no one participates. This is true even in videoconference sessions, which have not proven to be a practical solution to these problems.

Added to this is the fact that every conference entails, as it should, the presentation of an abstract, which in most cases is published in the book of abstracts for papers and posters, in the form of gray literature, which unfortunately is not cited in most cases, reducing its interest to everything mentioned above and not to the construction of a scientific narrative around a topic.

Are they then a waste of time?

As long as the participating scientist benefits from it in one way or another for their scientific career... no. But how can we be sure that our results presented at conferences contribute anything beyond our internal debates? We publish abstracts with fear, generalizing everything to avoid plagiarism, but without peer review. Yet, we then entrust our fate to repositories like BioRxive, where we submit the full article before publishing it in a journal.

https://hellobio.com/blog/ten-science-conferences-to-attend-in-2024.html

So, are we safe from academic and corporate plagiarism by publishing our abstracts and data in repositories as an alternative to or as a consequence of scientific conferences?

Certainly, in repositories, they are protected, have DOIs, are citable, and attest to the originality and uniqueness of your study, but with a little creativity, someone could imitate your experiments.

J.