Point of View: Mitigating the impact of conference and travel cancellations on researchers’ futures

QUEST – Quality | Ethics | Open Science | Translation, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin Institutes of Health, Germany
Division of Nephrology and Hypertension, Mayo Clinic, United States
West African Centre for Cell Biology of Infectious Pathogens, University of Ghana, Ghana
MRC Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology, University College London, United Kingdom
Non-Communicable Diseases Research Center, Endocrinology and Endocrinology and Metabolism Population Sciences Institute, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Islamic Republic of Iran
Instituto de Investigación en Biomedicina de Buenos Aires - CONICET - Partner Institute of the Max Planck Society, Argentina
Aarhus University, Denmark
Department of Biological Sciences, University of Alberta, Canada
Centro Integrativo de Biología y Química Aplicada, Universidad Bernardo O'Higgins, Chile
Department of Botany and Zoology, Stellenbosch University, South Africa
Department of Biology, Dalhousie University, Canada
Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics Option, California Institute of Technology, United States
Institute for Computational Medicine and the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, United States
Department of Biomedical Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore

Mar 27, 2020

1 table

Tables

Table 1

Option	Example(s)
Organize virtual poster sessions with live video and chat options.	Cognitive Neuroscience Society (2020)
Make abstracts, posters, and other conference materials freely available online for anyone to read and share.	SOT 2020 (Hines, 2020)
Allow speakers to offer a pre-recorded talk for any online session. Provide instructions for recording a talk. Invite pre-recorded speakers for a live Q and A session after their virtual talk, at a time that accommodates the speaker’s time zone.	Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI Foundation/IAS–USA, 2020)
Organize a virtual conference, followed by a virtual ‘unconference’ where scientists interact with others in small groups that are automatically matched based on similar interests.	Neuromatch 2020
Organize a free virtual conference using social media and videoconferencing.	Librarians Building Momentum for Reproducibility (2020) with draft guidance following their organizing experience available from Sayre et al. (2020) 1 ^st International Twitter Conference of Herpetology (Associação Portuguesa de Herpetologia, 2018)