Why was it mandatory to attend a conference in person while publishing a paper in pre-pandemic times, and how will conferences run post-pandemic?

Question

Conferences are a great platform to exchange ideas and to learn about different research areas. Also, more importantly, conferences expedite the process of publishing as journals may take months/years.

However, my question is - "why was is it mandatory to attend a conference in person in order to publish a paper in some xyz conference in pre-pandemic times?"

There are many people constrained by factors like money/time/family and struggle to attend conferences. They do prefer publishing their results at a conference in order to expedite the process of publishing but find it extremely difficult to travel to a foreign country. Conferences are conducted in extremely extravagant venues and attending just lectures costs 500+ euros, leave aside food and stay. Conferences are often held in big cities so lodging is also tough. Travelling to remote countries is not only expensive but also has a large environmental and climate footprint.

In order to grow in academia, it is important to publish fast. But why does research publishing forces constraints like this, and why nobody talks against this? Why cannot there be choice given to authors to not visit if there are other constraints.

Will post-pandemic era be different even slightly different, and will we be inspired by the online system of conference existing in current times.

Answer 1

Conferences are conducted in extremely extravagant venues and attending just lectures costs 500+ euros, leave aside food and stay.

The cynical answer is that in-person attendees pay fees that fund the conference.

Typically conferences involve people presenting the work in some fashion. Even now, video conferencing tools can be a bit unreliable. I'd say they've improved substantially since the pandemic encouraged a lot of investment in that area, and it works well with other trends in the tech industry like cloud services. That said, I think people attending a conference in person want to hear in-person presentations. If people show up at a conference where half of the presenters are remote, they might wonder why they bothered to come in person.

As @RichardErickson points out, in some fields conferences are not the norm, or at least are not the "most respected" venue for publication. So I'd say the causation is a bit upside down: you're asking "why are conferences this way" when you could possibly see it more directly the other way: "'conferences' are what we call it when work is presented this way". You could come up with alternatives, but A) Those alternatives already exist, and B) They just aren't called conferences.

Answer 2

Having been involved with the organization of a number of conferences, I observe that this comes from the peculiar combination of computer science publication culture and venue contracts.

For most other fields, this would simply never arise as an issue, because conferences don't have "real" publications, and thus there is no point to sending a paper to a conference that you don't attend. Because conference publications "count" in computer science and a few related fields, however, there is a strong incentive to publish but a weaker one to actually show up and give the talk.

So if you didn't force people to show up and give the talk, then a significant fraction of papers might not be presented. That's embarrassing for a conference, but worse, likely to be disastrous for its finances. And that is because of the contracts conferences have to sign with the venues that host them.

Most places that will host a conference, like hotels or convention centers (and even many universities!) will require a certain minimum revenue from the conference, based on the number of days and space that is being occupied. This can be structured in a number of ways, e.g., number of rentals from the room block, total cost, etc., but the bottom line is that for a typical conference the majority of your registration fee goes straight to the venue. And if not enough people show up, the conference still has to pay that minimum cost and will go into debt. Most conferences are thus always walking a fine line between higher registration fees (which attendees will resent) and higher risk of financial disaster (which may kill the conference). Requiring an author to attend (or at least pay a registration fee) is one way to help make finances a little more predictable.

During the pandemic, a lot of conferences have, in fact, successfully gone virtual, and I expect that some will continue that way. But people do still want and need to meet in person for a number of reasons, e.g., you can't have hallway conversations when there are no hallways! And any conferences that meet in person will, no doubt, be right back in the same tension between venues and attendees.

Answer 3

To answer your question with a question, what would be the point of publishing a paper at a conference that you don't attend?

I suspect this question is highly dependent on field, but in the natural sciences, I struggle to imagine what would be gained by submitting a paper to a conference that you do not attend. You cannot give a talk, you cannot rope people into your poster, you cannot network, and you can't do anything fun. Basically, you'd be throwing your idea/work out into the void--albeit a void where your work is now technically public, but not published in a journal, with none of the upsides. Why not just submit a paper to a journal at that point?

Answer 4

You point out the advantages of getting together at conferences. Prior to the internet this was the most efficient way for groups of scholars to meet and interact. That has changed, of course.

But, the fact remains that publishing isn't free. There are certain costs, perhaps a bit lower for online than print, but they are still there. Someone has to cover them and usually the funds come from a variety of sources.

For example, large conferences in CS normally have corporate sponsors who contribute to the costs. But attendance fees also cover a large part of the conference and subsequent publication. Members of organizations like ACM also contribute to publication costs through membership fees.

You also point out a problem. Costs, especially travel and housing costs, can be prohibitive for some people, especially if the conference is far away or there are disparities in the economies of different places. This problem doesn't have complete solution.

One possible solution would be for governments to get more involved, though that might also have downsides. But publication fees could be supported (in theory) by taxation, spreading the costs over more people.

Grants to individuals are possible in some places to cover conference fees and travel, but this needs to be planned for. The grants might come from governments (such as the NSF in the US) or from private companies. I once had such a corporate grant that I could use for travel.

Some academic institutions will also provide funds for conference travel, usually assuming the presentation of a paper.

Some conferences, but not the big ones, are held on university campuses during vacation times, reducing costs. But a large conference needs a large venue, with a lot of support activities, and those are, as you say, somewhat extravagant.

My personal view is that education and scholarship, including publishing, is insufficiently supported by government (taxation), and that is a US view. More, in my view, needs to be done to assure a better future.

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A note on the pandemic:

When the pandemic hit it was realized that things had to change and that standard practice couldn't be used. But the "compromises" made were always known to be imperfect and experimental. No one really had a very good way to carry on as in the past. But "let's do the best we can with what we have" let us stumble through the chaos. Either we eventually go back to what we had before (conferences) or we design a new way to interact remotely that doesn't have so many downsides. We don't know yet, which outcome will occur.

Answer 5

tl;dr: Many people like in-person conferences, and mandatory attendance for authors makes it easy to justify funding of conference trips.

In-person conferences are popular. One thing that many people like about them is that they mean a context change: people leave their familiar daily environment with its many distractions and constraints. Some people say that in-person conferences are the time when they actually get some serious work done.

With the mandatory attendance model, having a paper at a particular conference is often seen as a ticket for a funded trip to that conference: funders and institutions won't ask questions why the trip is necessary.

In contrast, virtual conferences have often been regarded as an additional burden to accommodate in an already-full schedule, rather than a relief.

Should models with non-mandatory in-person attendance (hybrid conferences) become more common, people are worried that this will negatively impact the support from their funders and institutions to visit conferences in person, because funding a whole conference trip is generally more expensive than just the registration fee for virtual attendance.

Answer 6

There's many excellent answers here, which give some of the reasons why conferences were held in person before the pandemic, but one thing I'll add is that even before the pandemic it was not always mandatory to attend the conference in person.

I absolutely love this example from 2016:

At the most prestigious annual conference on Adiabatic Quantum Computing, one of the most prominent researchers in all of quantum computing (Aram Harrow, a tenured professor at MIT, who you might know as the 'H' in the HHL algorithm) gave a lecture virtually at the in-person conference. You can see the entire talk, including the speaker on Skype (not Zoom) being introduced by the famous Ed Farhi who is often credited with coining the term "Adiabatic Quantum Computing" which is the name of the conference. He gave the talk virtually because he had recently had a baby.

It also happened in completely different research fields:

In chemistry, for many years before COVID, a Director at a Max Planck Institute named Ali Alavi gave lectures through Skype at various conferences in the United States while he was in Germany. Also, Terry Rudolph famously wrote in this paper:

"This article is the extended text of a talk I planned to give a couple of places in the United States this year, but will not do so now having been denied a visa (apparently no immigration officer likes to hear the words “Iran” and “physics” in the same sentence)"

after restrictions were placed on visiting the US, for anyone who had been to Iran since 2011, like Terry Rudolph had in this case. This was even more severe when Milad Marvian (who was living and working in California, at University of Southern California) and Masoud Mohseni (who was living and working in California, as a senior researcher at Google) could not attend a conference in 2018 that took place in California (the country they were living in!) because it was held at NASA which is an "independent agency" but still an agency of the US Federal Government, and therefore didn't allow people born in Iran to attend. Mohseni ended up choosing not to give a talk, Marvian gave a talk but it wasn't made available on Youtube; but Pooyah Ronagh who was a Canadian citizen and came to the conference from Canada and was at the conference dinner held off-site, had to still give his talk "virtually" because he wasn't allowed inside of the NASA building where the conference took place: he literally gave this virtual talk from just a few meters away from the audience (you can hear at the beginning of the linked Youtube video, the session chair saying "Pooyah will now give a talk from wherever he is right now").

So it wasn't always mandatory, even before COVID

I've given examples from several conferences since 2016, across more than one research area, where people attended talks virtually because of recently having a baby, or being restricted from attending the conference because of where they were born, or in one case it was a British-born citizen who unusually was denied entry into USA essentially because he'd visited Iran since 2011. The reasons why attending conference in-person was always preferred (before COVID) are very well spelled out in the other answers, and I agree that those are completely true, but if you could not attend the conference for some reason, it was often (though probably not always) made possible to attend virtually instead.

Answer 7

I work in a company that does a full spectrum service for academic conferences starting with newsletters, paper submissions, review up to registrations and scheduling. I am the developer by my colleagues do the venue planning. Been to a few conferences in very different fields as a result.

Some observations

a) Often conferences are held at the city where a major research institute in that field is located. This means visits to the labs or other pilot projects in the area are part of the program. This is useful to the attendees and I know attendees who attend just for that reason.

b) Conferences have a big role in exposing up-and-coming researchers to other institutes, a large part of the papers are PhD students that publish the first or second time and want to make a name for themselves. Nothing beats standing in front of the room and answering questions from the world leader in the field, letting him or her get to know you. If this was online the meetings never take place.

c) Some industry associations have board meetings once a year and co-locate it with conferences for this reason.

d) Some conferences are held in exotic locales for exotic reasons to be honest. But in the end most of them are close to a major research institute.

e) The people who make the money are the venues. They are crazy. Once we had to run a conference at a venue that wanted 100$ per week to rent a MOUSE. Never mind a presentation laptop. nowadays this is not a problems, laptops have become much lighter and presenters need less tech support. Powerpoint has actually improved. In those days this was a problem, but in the end it was cheaper to upgrade all of our companies laptops than to rent them on-site for a week. The institutes and organizers make very little profit.

f) The entertainment and networking are the most expensive part. I have been at a conference in applied physics that involved dinner for about 500 people that cost more than 100000$, which is a bit ridiculous. All of those conferences fees go straight towards the room rent and food you eat, no matter how bad it is.

But in the end, in-person conferences do have a function, especially if it is located close to an institute. I know of several cases where students got to know their advisors or got post-PhD jobs because they were at the right place at the right time and got to know the right people.

Answer 8

I am using the present tense, as if we were in pre-pandemic times.

In the field of engineering and computer science, almost all conferences make it compulsory for one of the authors to come to the venue and present their paper. Without this constraint, a conference would make much less sense. The very reason for conferences to exist is that people gather together, do social networking, get to know each other, listen to authors presenting their own work and have a chance to make public and private questions to them, or have conversations and exchange ideas and possibly projects with them. If you cannot do that, going to a conference loses half of its attractiveness.

That's the reason why I think that conferences will strive to keep working like that again, as far and as soon as possible.