Rethinking Academic Conferences in the Age of Pandemic

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper is relevant to the theme of the journal and will contribute to academic debate. The abstract is OK and well structured. In my opinion, the subject matter of the research problem is highly appreciable. It will make contributions to the relevant field of research. The presentation of thoughts in the paper is notable. However, the author(s) limited their work to the COVID 19 period. This is important considering the fact that the readers will be interested to reflect the findings of this paper in the post-COVID period . Also, the purpose of the paper is not clear. The rationale behind conducting this research is not clear i.e. why are they pursuing this research?
5-In addition, the authors need to provide their justification with regards to their novelty in this paper/ contributions to knowledge and cite more recent (2017-2022)

Author Response

Comments: The paper is relevant to the theme of the journal and will contribute to academic debate. The abstract is OK and well structured. In my opinion, the subject matter of the research problem is highly appreciable. It will make contributions to the relevant field of research. The presentation of thoughts in the paper is notable. However, the author(s) limited their work to the COVID 19 period. This is important considering the fact that the readers will be interested to reflect the findings of this paper in the post-COVID period . Also, the purpose of the paper is not clear. The rationale behind conducting this research is not clear i.e. why are they pursuing this research?

Reply: Thank you very much for your valuable comments. We have taken full considerations of all your comments and have accordingly revised the manuscript.

We had this research idea in early of 2020 when we had our conference paper accepted but attended it online, while we still paid a lot for the registration. Then we started to think why we should pay this amount of money since we had not been catered.

The motivation of this research is to advocate a revolution of academic conferences which have existed for decades. However, few opposite voice is heard. We therefore aim to arouse people’s attention to academic conferences and hope that something can be changed.

Based on your comments, we have made the following revisions:

• We have changed the title to be “Rethinking Academic Conferences in the Age of Pandemic”. We are positive that this title could be more appropriate to reflect the overall idea as well as the gist of this research.
• We have slightly polished the abstract as well as the introduction section to make the purpose of this research be much clearer.

Comments: In addition, the authors need to provide their justification with regards to their novelty in this paper/ contributions to knowledge and cite more recent (2017-2022)

Reply: We have polished the abstract and the introduction section to make sure that the novelty of this research is well justified. Meanwhile, we have cited the following recent researches:

Gottlieb, M., Landry, A., Egan, D. J., Shappell, E., Bailitz, J., Horowitz, R., & Fix, M. (2020). Rethinking residency conferences in the era of COVID‐19. AEM Education and Training, 4(3), 313-317.

Viglione, G. (2020). A year without conferences? How the coronavirus pandemic could change research. Nature, 579(7798), 327-329.

Lessing, J. N., Anderson, L. R., Mark, N. M., Maggio, L. A., & Durning, S. J. (2020). Academics in absentia: an opportunity to rethink conferences in the age of coronavirus cancellations. Academic Medicine, 95(12), 1834-1837.

Donlon, E. (2021). Lost and found: the academic conference in pandemic and post-pandemic times. Irish Educational Studies, 40(2), 367-373.

Woolston, C. (2020). Learning to love virtual conferences in the coronavirus era. Nature, 582(7810), 135-137.

Kaushik, M., & Guleria, N. (2020). The impact of pandemic COVID-19 in workplace. European Journal of Business and Management, 12(15), 1-10.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The text of the paper could tie in more with the with the data presented in appendix C and D. Where claims in the discussion could be reinforced by referencing the data in the appendix.

Furthermore the paper proposes some major initiatives, most of which have nothing to do with the subject of the paper. These initiatives and discussion as a whole should be more focused around the price increases, rather than the organization of conferences as a whole.

Likewise, the data does not account for inflation, which was quite sizable in some countries between 2019-2021, particularly in the EU. The price increases should be adjusted by the inflation changes for the given years, to give a better insight into the price increases. While this does not change the conclusion of the paper, which is quite clear from the data, it brings into question the scientific accuracy of the results.

If at all possible, could the subject of the paper be changed to better reflect the contents of the paper, where the main giveaway is that "going virtual" resulted in higher cost conferences.

Author Response

Comments: The text of the paper could tie in more with the data presented in appendix C and D. Where claims in the discussion could be reinforced by referencing the data in the appendix.

Reply: Many thanks for your valuable comments to our research. We have taken full considerations of all your comments. The manuscript therefore has been accordingly revised. Based on your comments, we have carefully revised section 3 in the main body of the manuscript. Specifically, when discussing the results, we have referred to the figures and tables presented in Appendix C and Appendix D.

Comments: Furthermore the paper proposes some major initiatives, most of which have nothing to do with the subject of the paper. These initiatives and discussion as a whole should be more focused around the price increases, rather than the organization of conferences as a whole.

Reply: Thank you very much for this comment. Note that this research is based on the price data that we have collected. What we actually want to convey is that the way how we organize academic conferences should be changed. Some of the proposed initiatives, such as the proposal to make the expenditure of the registration fee be open to the public, are related to this point.

Previously we had generalized the title of the paper to be focused on the registration fees of academic conferences, which we do believe that it is not appropriate to cover the big picture of this research.

As per your comments and those raised by other reviewers, we have changed the title of this paper to be “Rethinking Academic Conferences in the Age of Pandemic”. We are positive that the new title captures the whole idea of this research in a more appropriate way.

Comments: Likewise, the data does not account for inflation, which was quite sizable in some countries between 2019-2021, particularly in the EU. The price increases should be adjusted by the inflation changes for the given years, to give a better insight into the price increases. While this does not change the conclusion of the paper, which is quite clear from the data, it brings into question the scientific accuracy of the results.

Reply: Thank you for pointing out this issue. Inflation indeed affects the price. Like you have mentioned, the inflation only affects the accuracy of the results, but not the conclusion of this research. However, one of the research assumptions is that the inflation is not significant over the past three years. We have mentioned this in the Appendix section.

When collecting the data, we had considered this issue. What we have done are as follows: First, we collect the original data from the conference websites. Then we convert all the money number into USD based on the current real-time currency converter. For example, we collect the price data to be 1000 RMB for 2019. Then we convert it to be 147.25 USD (as of 2022-08-16). We have saved all the first-hand data, including the HTML documents showing the registration fees, the snapshots of websites showing the real-time currency conversion. All these data will be released online for research purpose once the paper is published.

At the moment, we propose not to consider the impact of inflation on the results, as it is beyond our scope. We sincerely seek your understanding.

Comments: If at all possible, could the subject of the paper be changed to better reflect the contents of the paper, where the main giveaway is that "going virtual" resulted in higher cost conferences.

Reply: We quite agree with your suggestion. Indeed, the original title of the paper conveys the idea that virtual conferences lead to very high registration fees. We do agree that such a giveaway may not reflect the whole picture of this research. Therefore, we have changed the paper title to make it more precise. We thank you again for your comments to our paper.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The topic is very interesting and draws attention to a daily "problem" in the academic life. For me, the sounding of the paper is quite negative, and I think an important aspect is missing: in some cases, conferences provide an opportunity to present the authors work in a high-quality paper, whose editorial cost remained the same regardless of the pandemic. Additionally, many costs remain, like marketing, labor, etc... Nevertheless, the paper contains valuable statements and - as the authors advised - transparency would show the structure of the budget. I suggest authors to ask for interviews with the organizers of academic conferences (not for this work, maybe for another research)

Article: The figures are understandable, they are of good quality and contain all the necessary information. Tables are also good and support the readers in understanding this topic.

The abstract does not contain any references, but I believe it should. Please add references from the introduction part (because they have same statements presented and cited there).

I suggest calculating the correlation between fee and publication opportunity, or any other variable, which seems to be value-added.

Please extend the 2.3 Data Analysis part with the research question, assigned methods, and explanation of the method as well.

If the most expensive field of study is presented, please tell something about the cheapest one :)

It is a great work, which needs a small correction from my point of view.a

Author Response

Comments: The topic is very interesting and draws attention to a daily "problem" in the academic life. For me, the sounding of the paper is quite negative, and I think an important aspect is missing: in some cases, conferences provide an opportunity to present the authors work in a high-quality paper, whose editorial cost remained the same regardless of the pandemic. Additionally, many costs remain, like marketing, labor, etc. Nevertheless, the paper contains valuable statements and - as the authors advised - transparency would show the structure of the budget. I suggest authors to ask for interviews with the organizers of academic conferences (not for this work, maybe for another research)

Reply: First of all, we would like to thank you for your valuable comments to our research. Your comments as well as those from other reviewers help us a lot to improve the paper. We have taken all the comments into consideration and have carefully revised the manuscript.

We quite agree with your concern that some of indirect costs may still remain. We have the experience of organizing international conferences. We do agree that some costs cannot be avoided. Even when organizing online conferences using platforms such as Teams or VooV, we have to pay for the platform.

We do notice that some of the presentations are quite negative or even a little bit subjective. Based on your comments, we have polished some of them.

We thank you for your insightful suggestion to do the interviews regarding conference organization. We will keep this point in mind and we do believe that more interesting research can be done. We do hope that this research can arouse people’s attention to academic conferences. It may take time to change something that have existed for decades. Nevertheless, we are contributing to this process.

Comments: Article: The figures are understandable, they are of good quality and contain all the necessary information. Tables are also good and support the readers in understanding this topic.

Reply: Thank you a lot for your very positive feedback. We feel encouraged by your comments, although this research may receive criticism from peers and even authorities, as the research may have touched their cakes of interests.

Comments: The abstract does not contain any references, but I believe it should. Please add references from the introduction part (because they have same statements presented and cited there).

Reply: Thanks for this suggestion. We believe that different journals have different template and preferences. Based on your suggestion, we went to the website of the Applied Sciences journal. We went through a couple of published papers. We have observed that this journal prefers not to include references in the Abstract. So we choose not to put references in it. Thanks for your understanding.

Comments: I suggest calculating the correlation between fee and publication opportunity, or any other variable, which seems to be value-added.

Reply: Thank you a lot for this valuable comment. Indeed, it would be very interesting if we can do some causal effect analysis such as the correlation calculation between the fee and other variables. However, at the moment we do not have such kind of data such as the GDP of each country, the number of attendees for each conference, etc. Our next-step research is to collect such kind of data for more in-depth study.

Comments: Please extend the 2.3 Data Analysis part with the research question, assigned methods, and explanation of the method as well.

Reply: We do notice that section 2.3 is not well explained. Based on your comments, we have thoroughly revised section 2.3. The research questions are explicitly listed out. The adopted methods and the corresponding explanations to the methods are added to provide more details of this research.

Comments: If the most expensive field of study is presented, please tell something about the cheapest one. It is a great work, which needs a small correction from my point of view.

Reply: We thank you once more for the time you had spent reviewing our paper. We do hope that this research can attract scientists’ attention to rethink academic conferences. We also hope that concerted efforts will be taken in the near future to make things change.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors have addressed my comments.