Comment pubs.acs.org/est
Worth the Trip
S
professional societies usually hold their meetings in locations that are convenient and affordable. If there are enough attractive sessions, they can also attract a global audience. The Environmental Chemistry Division of the ACS has managed to achieve this a few times in recent years (e.g., the 2014 summer meeting in San Francisco), but more often there are not enough noteworthy sessions to make the biannual meetings indispensible. If conference organizers were willing to avoid the temptation to hold meetings too often, their meetings would be more exciting and better attended. Conference attendees also need to do their part to make meetings worthwhile. Granted, quality of the research will always be a primary consideration, but all too often, good researchers give inferior presentations. Although researchers get hundreds of hours of instruction during their careers, it is painfully obvious that few receive any formal training in public speaking. We are all familiar with the way that ideas can go viral through TED talks, so it is hard to understand why researchers are not seizing the opportunity to increase the impact of their research by giving more compelling presentations. Even after researchers learn the mechanics of delivering presentations they frequently miss the point: The audience is seeking insights that go beyond a report on data. Conference presentations should challenge the audience by presenting new ideas that have not already been published. When published research is presented, the presentation should offer a synthesis that explains how the research advances the discipline. Our community still values scientific conferences and the networking opportunities that they provide. Meetings will only remain an integral part of our shared experience if they can change with the times. If we want to return from conferences energized with fresh, new ideas, conferences organizers and attendees have to be held to a higher standard. We need to capture the magic that can only be found in face-to-face interactions. Now that wasted time is measured in minutes, the investment of an entire week means that we need to do everything in our power to make sure that every conference is worth the trip.
ummertime: A blissful season of longer days, fewer responsibilities, and enough time to attend scientific meetings. The act of packing a suitcase and heading out for a conference harkens back to an earlier, less complicated era when it was possible to spend a week immersed in discussions about research without feeling compelled to connect to an electronic device between talks. Back in the days of typewriters, expensive phone calls, and a one-year lag between manuscript submissions and publication, face-to-face meetings were essential. But in a world where papers appear online 6 weeks after submission and collaborators stay in touch by video conferences, e-mail, and social media, the scientific conference can seem like an artifact that might go the way of the travel agent, book store, and taxi cab. While the lasting impact of many conferences is hard to quantify if you are not a collector of reusable grocery bags and travel mugs, some have found a way to stay relevant. For example, anyone who has boarded the bus to a New England campus understands how a Gordon Research Conference can inspire and energize a researcher. These conferences succeed, in part, because the isolated, dormitory lifestyle turns a couple of hundred researchers into a community. The structure of the meetingkeynote lectures from established leaders and rising stars with after-talk discussions that are half as long as the presentationsassures that new ideas will be debated in a public forum. To make the meetings more interactive, attendees who were not invited as speakers present posters in compulsory sessions that last long enough to exhaust everyone in the room. And finally, and perhaps most significantly, the expectation that most of the data presented in talks and posters has not yet been published assures that the participants leave the conference with knowledge that could not already be acquired online. Unfortunately, not every conference follows this format. Many professional societies still select platform talks on the basis of extended abstracts, which results in talks describing research that was completed years before the conference occurs. Talks, which are given much more attention than the sparsely attended poster sessions, are shoehorned into 20 min blocks with little time reserved for discussion. Given the myriad of ways that information can now be obtained, it is no wonder that this type of traditional meeting model often fails to inspire the audience. Simple changes, like cutting out a few talks to make room for longer discussion periods, elevating the importance of the poster session and requiring session chairs to lead a discussion instead of simply calling on audience members in the order in which they raised their hands, would greatly improve many conferences. In addition to rethinking the traditional meeting format, we can improve our conferences by making sure that they attract the right attendees. Despite the increasing globalization of the research endeavor, specialty conferences held in exotic locations usually fail to attract new attendees from the local community, resulting in the exclusion of younger researchers and researchers from less well funded institutions. In contrast, © 2015 American Chemical Society
■
David Sedlak,* Editor-in-Chief AUTHOR INFORMATION
Corresponding Author
*E-mail:
[email protected]. Notes
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the author and not necessarily the views of the ACS. The authors declare no competing financial interest. Published: July 24, 2015 8923
DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.5b03563 Environ. Sci. Technol. 2015, 49, 8923−8923
