Remember the times when academics met at conferences to discuss the newest results of their research, find collaboration partners, or even just to mingle? It seems these times are over. The latest trend at universities (blame it on the credit crunch, if you like) is to not support conference attendance any more. There is just one catch: presenting a paper at a conference is a first step towards a journal publication, especially if you get good feedback at the conference. And another: you won’t really know much about potential collaboration partners without ever meeting them. It’s not as if “upcoming” projects would ever be found on a website or in journal publications…
There is another problem with the “first step towards a publication” notion: some conference explicitly see their proceedings as publications and do not allow you to send them further to a journal (not even if you really worked on them later).
Will this be the end to academics going to conferences?
Gyöngyi
