“Is the scientific conference in its death throes? Researchers have long anguished about the hyper-competitive culture that leads attendees to suppress their most interesting unpublished results. Such protectiveness can only be worsened by the increasing dissemination of results beyond the conference hall by bloggers.” So opens an Editorial in Nature this week (460, 152; 2009. free to read online). “We are in the midst of a clash of conference-going cultures (see Nature 459, 1050–1051; 2009). Attendees who have taken to blogs and other social-media applications such as Twitter and Friend Feed will value the instantaneous communication of fact, conjecture and commentary as a way to network beyond badge-holders. Most researchers, in contrast, will focus on the science and ways to network with fellow attendees. If they are aware of social-networking applications, they are likely to regard them as distractions at best. At worst, they will fear them as tools to undermine and scoop, to release data not ready for consumption by anyone other than the trusted colleagues who bothered to make it to their talk or walk up to their poster and start asking questions…Conference organizers are stuck in the middle. They want to let the world know that their meetings are worthwhile, and yet they also want to attract speakers presenting the newest and most cutting-edge findings. So how to protect speakers from having sensitive, unfinished or ‘scoopable’ work broadcast to the world?…Nature has made the case that blogging by researchers is good. Critical discussion of worthy results should not in principle be restricted to walls of a conference hall or even the pages of a journal. Any meeting to which anyone can register is fair game for all available communications technologies — and any rules that cannot be policed will be ignored anyway.
But some of the most valuable scientific meetings are more focused and deliberative, and are by invitation only. These intellectually intimate gatherings are valuable precisely because the researchers who attend feel free to speculate and to stimulate their colleagues, and to try to establish new research agendas. Whether an attendee is a blogger or a reporter or a practising researcher is immaterial. The meeting is ‘off the record’, and all have to sign up to that. Closed or open? Meeting organizers need to be clear in their minds which of these two approaches is appropriate, and be explicit about it from start to finish. The consequence that, in competitive fields, presentations at open meetings will become even more protective and boring is an inevitable consequence of the Internet.”