![]() ![]() ![]() 2), which may indicate that additional obstacles impede the participation of those groups in academia that were not improved after removal of financial (for example, by free registration) and administrative barriers (for example, by lack of traveling requirement). However, the relative proportion of attendees from under-represented minorities remains low (6.15% (23/374) in 2019 and 9.89% (387/3913) in 2020) (Fig. The number of individuals belonging to under-represented minorities 10 (specifically, African American and Hispanics) increased from 19 to 331, demonstrating a substantial increase in the virtual platform reaching a broader range of under-represented communities. The total number of participants rose from 374 in 2019 to 3,913 in 2020, a 900% increase, while the percentage of female participants remained the same (Fig. The gender and ethnicity of participants were imputed from participant names using machine-learning approaches (see Supplementary Methods). To investigate the impact of virtual conferences in more depth, we compared the distribution of participants from the in-person versus virtual platforms for one of the four conferences (RECOMB) using data from 20. To further illustrate the distribution of participants and speakers across gender, ethnicity and country, comparing virtual platforms in 2020 with in-person platforms in 2019, we focused on four conferences: the Bioinformatics Community Conference (BCC), BioConductor Annual Meeting (BIOC), Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) and Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB) (Fig. We selected the most popular conference, the Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB) conference, in computational biology with free registration to illustrate the impact of virtual platforms on reducing financial and administrative burdens for participants. Among the 22, we observed a decrease in registration fee overall, with most (but not all) conferences waiving the attendance fee altogether for the online conference. Of these, 22 adapted to the virtual format, whereas 2 were canceled altogether for the year. We performed a systematic analysis of 24 conferences between January and August 2020 across medicine, biology, computer science and other fields. What distinguishes a conference from a series of webinars is the active participation by the attendees 9. Here, we set out to test this hypothesis by analyzing the demographics of attendees at four major conferences before and after the fully virtual format was adopted. Another major advantage is the reduction of cost, not only in terms of registration fees and travel by the attendees but also in terms of organizing the conference itself 8. Virtual conferences are not bound to one physical location, which promises to increase global participation and promote inclusivity among attendees 6, 7. ![]() This not only provides flexibility in regard to who can attend but also promises to break logistical barriers associated with physical travel and to connect researchers across the globe. However, whereas in-person conferences are restricted in the number of attendees they can accommodate, virtual conferences have the major advantage that the number of participants attending, and the geographical regions the conference can reach, can be scaled up relatively easily. In some respects, more effort is required to put together a virtual conference than an in-person one, especially in terms of engaging prospective participants and garnering their interest for upcoming years. There are also logistic aspects to consider. ![]()
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