I received a polite complaint from an attendee, followed by an equally polite request from one of the conference organizers, to remove my notes concerning their, or all, talks respectively. But I had cleared it with another organizer on site, though I don’t want to get them in hot water, either. So I just sent the following:
Dear participants in the NTD meeting,
It was a true pleasure meeting you in Vermont. Thank you for all the many interesting conversations and lines of inquiry we pursued together.
I’m writing because I wanted to alert you all to the fact that I make my conference notes available to my laboratory, and thereby to the world at large, on our lab wiki. The notes I took during the four days in Vermont, warts and all, have been posted since those days, at these links:
(The same ones I provided earlier).
I had made my live conference notes known early on to only one of the organizers, and that was a mistake. Coincidentally, Nature recently wrote an editorial about how difficult it is for conference organizers to take a hard-and-fast line, but I’d add that it is a little difficult for attendees to know what line to take as well:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v460/n7252/full/460152a.html
There is also a Nature-run forum discussing this issue here, to which you certainly would be welcome to contribute if you have an opinion on the question (rather than writing back to this mailing list):
http://network.nature.com/groups/naturenewsandopinion/forum/topics/4044
My take is that a communication at a conference is already a type of publication. However, I recognize that it is not a universally held position.
Please have a look at the links I provide above, and if you are at all uncomfortable with my personal take on your presentation, I invite you to send me an e-mail and I will remove my notes about it. Unfortunately, I can’t do much about Google’s cache, but I think it unlikely that anyone would track things that far.
My sincere apologies to anyone who may be unhappy with learning about this retroactively rather than proactively. (Also, sorry if I didn’t take notes and that bothers you! It just meant that the abstracts sufficed for me, or I had stopped live notes by that point.)
Have a great weekend and please excuse me for any offense 1 I may have caused.
Sincerely yours,
Heather
1 Link not in the e-mail.
And then I wrote the organizer who brought up the issue, saying I’d be willing to remove all my notes if they consider it necessary. I suspect that I’ll have to just keep the notes on my computer, like for some sensitive group meeting discussions. For the latter, at least I know what I need to elide. But for a conference?
The voiced concern was, for unpublished data, that confidentiality is not observed (though the confidential nature of conference communications was not made explicit, I thought) and that later publication of the material might be jeopardized.
While I admit the former, is the latter at all true? I thought we had sort of settled that question already.
Update:
The other major organizer wrote me and asked me to remove all notes. So I did. And I replied: (because I was sorry to do it)
I’ve often posted my notes from conferences to my lab wiki. I did ask you if I could, and you told me on site that it was alright. Perhaps I wasn’t clear about it, or perhaps you thought it was restricted to my lab only.
I’ve complied with your and (…)‘s request just now, but I was not the only one sending live impressions from the meeting to co-workers in ways that leave traces on the Internet. Therefore, in the future, it might be safer to make the conference policy fully explicit relative to divulgation of notes to each attendee’s laboratory, Ph.D. program institution or the world at large.
Even then, as the links I provided make clear, explicit policy is no guarantee of full confidentiality. This is the risk people take when they attend conferences, and it will become ever more present, as the density of Blackberries, laptops and iPhones in the room attested.
I guess this is going to be a contentious issue for a while until people figure out what they want to prioritise and develop some clear policies – and learn to express those policies clearly to everyone at the beginning of the conference.
All is not lost some conference organisers are starting to recognise the value of an official conference blogger
Ugh.. this just keeps rearing it’s ugly head.
Ugh.. this just keeps rearing it’s ugly head.Stopping bloggers from discussing what they saw at a conference is going to come back to bite the organizers of conferences in the end. It’s a fundamental pillar of science to discuss, vet and come to a general consensus about what each experiment means: That is the essence of the peer review process.
Ugh.. this just keeps rearing it’s ugly head.Stopping bloggers from discussing what they saw at a conference is going to come back to bite the organizers of conferences in the end. It’s a fundamental pillar of science to discuss, vet and come to a general consensus about what each experiment means: That is the essence of the peer review process.If scientists can’t discuss publicly disclosed materials (presentations included), we may as well toss in the towel on the whole concept of peer review. It’s about time conference organizers and publication editors realized that they don’t hold the monopoly on communication in the sciences.
Ugh.. this just keeps rearing it’s ugly head.Stopping bloggers from discussing what they saw at a conference is going to come back to bite the organizers of conferences in the end. It’s a fundamental pillar of science to discuss, vet and come to a general consensus about what each experiment means: That is the essence of the peer review process.If scientists can’t discuss publicly disclosed materials (presentations included), we may as well toss in the towel on the whole concept of peer review. It’s about time conference organizers and publication editors realized that they don’t hold the monopoly on communication in the sciences.I’m sorry you had to take down your notes.
whoa… not sure what happened there… My text definitely didn’t look like that when I typed it.
Strange – but rather poetic. :-)
Thanks. I feel a little more justified in my disappointment. After all, I really do not make any claim to be a journalist, and my notes were far less readable than Alex’s were. If anyone had asked me to the/an official blogger, I’d have gone about it differently. Or refused. Or both.
Strangely, I had rather the opposite experience at a different conference a couple of years ago, where I was a little bemused to see the press office posting my pseudonymous and absolutely not comprehensive comments on their press release board throughout the week.
I think conference organizers have to be explicit from the outset – if the meeting is closed and under Charterhouse Rule, that means no dissemination. If not – sky’s the limit. Everyone would be happier knowing the score in advance – including speakers, who might choose to be a bit less forthcoming in the latter case. I know I would.
Jennifer, I think your opinion is very interesting, as I know you’ve been scooped before, and the first person who had written to ask to remove my notes had been scooped in the past. I still wonder, if the danger is so great, why present the work in public right then anyhow, and not wait until the year of the publication? The gene in question this person was studying was a very obvious candidate gene based on other known implicated genes.
I was thinking that this sort of smaller meeting is meant to encourage collaborations and be more intimate and sharing of unpublished results – but exclusive of whom, then? Aren’t potential competitors going to be there, anyhow?
I also think this is probably a bit of a non-problem currently. Most conferences are not being blogged, and people taking notes don’t put them on an Internet-accessible site. But it’s naive to presume things will always stay like that.
Cameron Neylon has created a few useful images such as these:-
SOURCE
and
SOURCE
I agree its important that conference organizers are clear. I have to admit that I have stopped live blogging or posting of notes from any conference where it isn’t either apparent that everyone assumes its going on (anything to do with anything online reall) and I simply can’t be bothered asking all the speakers.
But to come to the point that I think Heather is asking – I am not aware of any journal that would object to publication of anything that had been placed online by someone else. Some journals will be iffy about stuff that has been placed online by the authors themselves and there are concerns about people actively seeking media attention. But the bottom line is that in most cases this concern about not being able to publish, because something has appeared online, is nonsense.
It would be nice if journals made their policies clearer. NPG have been good about this but otherwise clarity is a bit patchy.
Oh and while I remember – the images Graham has posted are public domain as far as I am concerned so feel free to use them if you wish to be clear.
Thanks, Cameron, for the images! And a little validation of my premise is welcome.
I only received one response, today, from one researcher, asking me to remove all references to “any of her unpublished work”. I responded that it took just one click to see that it had been done last week, and that it wasn’t my job to verify whether her work had been published or not if she came to a conference to present it. She was just in the wrong inbox at the wrong time. :-)
I have to admit that I have stopped live blogging or posting of notes from any conference where it isn’t either apparent that everyone assumes its going on (anything to do with anything online really) and I simply can’t be bothered asking all the speakers.
I’m afraid this will have to be my approach as well, at the risk of pissing off lots of unsuspecting folks. Now that I have a better search engine locally that allows me to find keywords in any text document efficiently (as much so as the wiki, anyhow), I don’t feel so bad about that for my own use, although I’d just as well my notes help out anyone who’d be bothered to read them.
I still wonder, if the danger is so great, why present the work in public right then anyhow, and not wait until the year of the publication?
We all take calculated risks in talking about our research, because there are benefits to be had in getting early feedback from non-benign colleagues. How much the risk is depends on how many people are in the audience – I even think about this when I give a small institute talk (in which people from the outside might attend). If I’m invited to a Gordon or other closed conference, I know that it’s a closed meeting, so it’s not as big a risk as an open one (though of course there will still be some risk). All of this is weighed in when I decide what to present at a given meeting.
If all meetings were to become wholly open, I would present less and get less out of the meeting. This is why I still advocate that some closed meetings continue. As I’ve said before, if you don’t approve of closed meetings, don’t go to them. Either way, I can’t see how having clarity at the outset can be a bad thing.
non-benign colleagues
Great. Now I’m imagining malignant biologists. Thanks.
Jane (and Jennifer) – you’re absolutely right. From the point of view of a presenter, you want to know when the doors are (pretty much) closed, and you can be much more forthcoming.
But from the point of view of an attendee, I still think speakers should always be aware that “presenting their work at meetings [includes] a much larger, unseen audience.” You never know who is friends with whom, and who might knowingly or not slip a tip to your favorite competitor, in the sense of “I heard a talk on something that sounds just like what you’re doing!” And I saw a lot of people with their iPhones out, not all of whom were only reading their e-mail.
In lab, we talked it over a bit (since my notes were intended to be available to them, essentially, and my page hits only ever hit three figures, max) and we thought that the difference is mostly in scale. “Damage” is more containable if you think that attendees at a conference are only going spread your notes by word of mouth (or e-mail, I suppose). Twitter/blog/freely accessible conference notes on a wiki – these are all more easily searchable and archived, and would indeed incite presenters to always stay “safe”.
My contention is that for those who really worry about being safe, they should realize what it takes to ensure that level of safety. The rest of us, can rest assured that some experimental lines of work are so cumbersome to undertake that announcing unpublished data in a conference, as I had also done, can be done relatively safely because anyone attempting to redo the work as we had would start three years later than us. If part of our work could help others reframe whatever they had going on, then it’s to the greater benefit of science. As long as we still get published. :-)
It’s also illusory to think that results are being disseminated in real time – there is always some lag between the bench and the presentation, though it’s usually less than a year.
I really appreciate the multiple points of view in this thread. And it seems like we all agree that organisers should be aware of the reporting issue and make a proactive policy that attendees can count on.