Matthew Skiles

Who they are

Skiles and eleven co-authors took advantage of a format change nobody chose. Conferences that had run in person for years were forced online in 2020, which created something close to a natural experiment: the same events, the same organisers and broadly the same fields, with the travel removed. They compared the 2020 virtual editions against the 2015 to 2019 in-person editions on cost, gender, career stage, geography and carbon.

Audiences grew. The virtual editions drew audiences approximately 40 to 120 per cent larger than the historical in-person average. The mechanism they propose is cost, and they quantify it in the way that makes the point unanswerable. Compared with United States attendees, the average researcher from Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Oceania paid between 90 and 210 per cent more to attend one conference's in-person editions, and the cost of attending ran at between 80 and 250 per cent of their country's annual output per head, against roughly 3 per cent of output per head for United States participants. A conference priced like that is not an open meeting.

The sharpest result in the paper is the one that stops it being a cheerful story about screens. The 2020 virtual edition of one conference ran its synchronous live talks on a United States clock. Attendance from Europe rose 102 per cent against the 2015 to 2019 average and attendance from the Middle East rose 76 per cent. Attendance from Asia, where sessions fell around or past midnight local time, did not rise. The same format, the same removed airfare, and no gain, because of a scheduling decision. That is an argument about design rather than about mediation.

Participation by women rose, with a larger percentage increase for female than male scientists at two of the conferences, and after one 2020 conference was announced as virtual, 37 per cent of submitted abstracts came from female researchers. Students and postdoctoral researchers attended in substantially greater numbers while attendance by other job types stayed fairly constant. Reported attendance by gender-queer and transgender scientists rose, and the authors themselves note that the increase may partly reflect reporting rather than participation, which is the sort of caveat worth repeating. On carbon, the cumulative footprint of more than 7,000 attendees across three 2020 virtual conferences was comparable to the average footprint of a single in-person attendee.

Three qualifications belong with every figure above. The comparison is observational and across years, not randomised. Several co-authors were organisers of the conferences analysed, and the manuscript declares it. And the Asian attendance result shows that the access gain is not a property of being online.

The paper was read here at partial strength: the accepted manuscript was read for the abstract, the results, the figure legends and the competing-interests statement, and the supplementary tables were not read.

Key papers

Skiles is a working engineering researcher and the output here is a journal article rather than a book. This publication has verified no book of his and lists the paper instead rather than padding the page.

Skiles, M., Yang, E., Reshef, O., Robalino Munoz, D., Cintron, D., Lind, M. L., Rush, A., Perez Calleja, P., Nerenberg, R., Armani, A., Faust, K., & Kumar, M. (2022). "Conference demographics and footprint changed by virtual platforms." Nature Sustainability, 5, 149-156. doi:10.1038/s41893-021-00823-2, online December 2021. Andrea Armani, Kasey Faust and Manish Kumar are the corresponding authors. The manuscript declares that several co-authors organised the conferences analysed.

Key ideas

Conferences that moved online drew audiences roughly 40 to 120 per cent larger than their own in-person editions.

Cost is the proposed barrier, and it is quantified: attendance at the in-person editions cost some researchers between 80 and 250 per cent of their country's annual output per head, against roughly 3 per cent for United States participants.

The gain is a design choice. Running live sessions on a United States clock raised European and Middle Eastern attendance sharply and did nothing for attendance from Asia.

Participation rose among women, students and postdoctoral researchers, and the carbon footprint of more than 7,000 virtual attendees was comparable to that of one in-person attendee.

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