Are scientific meetings a great money making opportunity?
There’s a lot of debate on The Internets about the ‘evil’ publishers of scientific journals at the moment - my personal view is that there are too many journals, too many papers, and a lot of stuff probably never gets cited, so why not just have expectations of fewer higher quality publications. Google citations now makes me painfully aware of all the bad choices I made in the past preparing papers for journals/books that were only ever cited in my resume (and it turns out that isn’t a real citation, but maybe if I paid someone it could be ;) ).
A side-show to the discussion about journals is conferences, and thanks to Tudor for first making me think about this - these seem to be going through a transition to where as an academic scientist you’re now seen by conference organisers as an extra revenue source - either as a honeypot if you’re a big name to draw people in, or as a participant in an implicit pay-to-speak business model. I know from my experience in biotech that invariably an invitation to speak at these commercially organised conferences was accompanied with the obligation to book an expensive booth in the expo hall - hardly a route to avoid conflicts of interest in a balanced set of speakers.
Now I’m on the other side of the fence, an academic, and I’m in the lucky current position to be invited to some excellent conferences, and also get invited to quite a few not so excellent ones. I’m happy to pay to go from my grants for some of these, others I get travel and so forth paid.
The sort of invite that starts…
Dear Professor Overington due to your excellence in Molecular Biology and
Transcriptional Control we would like to invite you to give a plenary lecture
on any subject you would like, at our forthcoming XXXVIIth International
Meeting on Drug Science and Innovation.
I love the fact that probably the world’s worst mailmerge programme has been used, and all the fonts and colours are all over the place, and also that your area of expertise is essentially random.
I got into the bad habit of replying to some of these, enquiring about travel costs, since these are usually the most material costs for going to a conference, and I have limited funds and time. This sometimes led to exchanges where partial offset of registration was maybe possible (er, I had assumed it would be free, actually) and then a request for a photo of me to be presented before the SAB to decide on how much support they could provide. As if a photo of me is going to encourage any money to be released - at this point, in hindsight I crossed the line into what is know, amongst the youngsters of today as ‘trolling’ - this is probably a crime, so sorry. I then asked what type of photo they would like - face and shoulders, full-body, action, glamour - and often got interesting responses… Seriously, do I want to be any part of a system that uses my physical appearance to help a decision to grant me a bursary to speak at a conference I’ve been invited to?
Another big warning sign is where there are words like “honour”, “prestige”; or worse still, that you have to sign up to a series of one-on-one special meetings - read my lips “I have limited interests and money, I’m not interested in buffers, CRO chemistry or externalisation of my IT functions” - these are just embarassing to sit in, and will be a waste of mine and the other participants time. There’s a clear spectrum of conferences from volunteer interest groups, through professional society organised ones, and then on to out and out commercial ventures. The former are often run using favours from host institutes, and the latter are to make money for somebody. I know the number of rich pharma attendees is falling, but that doesn’t mean that academic speakers are the obvious place to think of creative ways to pad the bottom line.
For invited ‘academic’ speakers at a ‘commercial’ conference I think it is reasonable that…
- Return travel is paid for.
- Registration is waived.
- Accommodation is paid for.
- WiFi costs at the venue are waived (this is soooooo expensive now at loads of places).
- And in return, you will hang around for the entire conference, and not just up for your talk/session.