Your professor is teaching a class on research policy. Write a post responding to the professor's question. Express and support your opinion and contribute to the discussion in your own words. An effective response has at least 100 words.
Dr. Marcus Lindqvist
Academic conferences bring researchers together but involve a great deal of long-distance flying. Some organisations now hold them entirely online. Supporters say this cuts emissions sharply, costs far less and lets researchers attend who could never afford the travel. Critics say that the valuable part of a conference is the unplanned conversation, that online events reproduce the formal talks and lose everything else, and that early-career researchers suffer most from the loss. Should academic conferences move online? Why?
Yara
I support moving online, and the access argument settles it for me. A conference in Vancouver is open to researchers with a grant that covers flights. The same conference online is open to everybody with a connection, including people in institutions that have never been able to send anyone. Whatever is lost in corridor conversation is lost mainly by the people who were already in the corridor.
Daniel
The access point is strong and I would not argue with it. But Yara is comparing an online conference with an expensive one rather than with the alternative that is actually available, which is a regional meeting. Several fields have moved to clusters of in-person meetings linked by video, and those keep the corridor and cut most of the flying. If that option exists, the choice is not between access and conversation.