The CC0 Public Domain is a credit.
New research shows that the change in travel and in-person conferences caused by the COVID-19 Pandemic has made it easier for more people to attend.
Several science conferences that first went virtual during the early months of the Pandemic were analyzed by a research team from The University of Texas at Austin. In a new paper, published today in Nature Sustainability, the researchers examined the environmental, social and economic costs of virtual conferences compared with in-person events and analyzed how the shift online altered participation by women, early-career researchers and scientists from underrepresented institutions and countries.
The study found that virtual events lower costs and reduce time and travel commitments that have previously held some conferences back from attracting diverse groups of attendees. The environmental costs of people flying from around the world to attend a conference are eliminated.
"When we went virtual, it brought a lot more voices to the table that weren't able to be there for in-person events because of cost, time and other reasons," said Faust.
The cost of in-person attendance for scientists from Africa to several recent conferences was on average between 80% and 250% of their country's annual per person gross domestic product, compared with 3% of U.S. participants.
Investments in time are also required for in-person events. These events take up a lot of attendees' time and require a lot of travel.
This can be a challenge for women. The period of life for younger workers tends to fall around the time that many are having children. Faust said that getting away to conferences is challenging for women.
The study shows that women's participation in virtual conferences increased as much as 25%. Students and scholars increased their attendance by as much as 344%.
The scale of the impact is staggering. The researchers estimate that a single attendee of an in-person conference had the same environmental footprint as 7,000 virtual conference attendees.
Virtual events open up opportunities for more international participation, which is limited by cost and travel documentation. One woman in the study who is a mother of small children said that she didn't have the necessary travel documents to travel outside her country, keeping her from attending conferences around the world.
"She could network more than she has ever done before, and that never would have happened with an in-person conference," said Manish Kumar, an associate professor in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering.
The team includes researchers from UT Austin, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Southern California, and Arizona State University. One of the first engineering conferences to go virtual was the annual meeting of the North American Membrane Society. The study was expanded to compare in-person and virtual attendance at engineering conferences.
The study found benefits to virtual conferences. A lack of engagement and missing out on in-person networking are among them. Almost all of the attendees at one scientific conference preferred in-person networking and almost all of the attendees at another conference preferred virtual sessions.
The researchers expect many events to create hybrid offerings that could be cheaper.
Kumar said that tech companies are doing this with their events. "Smart people will hybridize their events at some point."
Matthew Skiles and his team report on the demographic and footprint changes by virtual platforms. There is a DOI of 10.1038/s41893-021-00823-2.
The journal information is about nature.
Virtual conferences are better for the environment and more inclusive.
The document is copyrighted. Any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research cannot be reproduced without written permission. The content is not intended to be used for anything other than information purposes.
