tag: Scholarly societies
Blog Post
August 15, 2023
The Future of Annual Meetings and Scholarly Societies
New Report from Ithaka S+R and JSTOR Labs
As the pandemic recedes into memory, scholarly societies find themselves at a crossroads. For the past several years, the decision to hold hybrid or virtual meetings was dictated by outside forces: it is now a matter of choice. Though the virtual meetings of 2020-22 mostly failed to provide the rich social and networking experiences that in-conference meetings provide, they were more accessible to a much wider, and more diverse, community of scholars.
Research Report
August 15, 2023
Of Meetings and Members
The Interconnected Future of Conferences and Scholarly Societies
As the pandemic recedes into memory, societies find themselves at a crossroads. For several years, the decision to hold hybrid or virtual meetings was dictated by outside forces: it has now become a question of societies’ priorities, mission, and values. It is too early to tell whether the virtual meetings of 2020-22 were anomalies, but a casual observer might reasonably describe the “new normal” as nearly identical to the old one. A closer view suggests a more nuanced picture.
Blog Post
July 20, 2022
The Many Faces of Meetings
A Taxonomy of Emerging Models for In-Person and Hybrid Conferences
Scholarly conferences are at a crossroads. The pandemic has made it clear that virtual meetings are not only possible, but make conferences more accessible to a broader, and more diverse audience. At the same time, the pandemic has clarified the unique value that in-person meetings offer due to their capacity to leverage physical proximity to promote social engagement, networking, and serendipitous interaction that foster the generation of new ideas. As organizers begin to shift their…
Blog Post
December 9, 2021
Charting a Path Forward for Academic Conferences
Announcing the Cohort for Our Project on the Future of Scholarly Meetings
Conferences and meetings are among the most venerable and vital services scholarly societies provide to members. They serve as gathering places for communities and important venues for scholarly communication. They are also essential to many societies’ financial models. The global pandemic has accelerated existing pressures on academic conferences, forcing societies to adopt virtual and hybrid formats. It has become clear that these new modalities have tangible benefits to members and the potential to reach new constituencies, but financial…
Blog Post
October 18, 2021
The Future of Scholarly Meetings
Announcing a New Cohort Project Funded by the Sloan Foundation
The COVID-19 pandemic forced scholarly societies to reimagine one of their signal offerings: academic conferences. In response, societies experimented with virtual and hybrid meeting formats on a scale that was difficult to imagine before March 2020. Societies have emerged from these experiments with an equal measure of worry and cautious optimism about the potential of these new forums to replace or supplement the traditional annual meeting. With generous funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Ithaka…
Research Report
October 18, 2021
COVID-19 and the Future of the Annual Meeting
In February 2020, the Biogen conference in Boston, Massachusetts, became one of the first superspreader events in the United States—one now linked to perhaps 300,000 cases of COVID-19. By mid-March, in-person conferences, a staple of scholarly communication and community, came to an abrupt halt. For the many professional societies for whom a conference is a core offering, the necessity of charting a new path for their annual meeting was among the most difficult organizational challenges created by the pandemic. As…
Issue Brief
October 28, 2020
Scholarly Societies in the Age of COVID
As membership organizations with revenues typically derived from a combination of publications, meetings, and dues, scholarly societies have faced distinctive challenges, as well as opportunities, in navigating the pandemic. To explore these, we spoke with chief executives and chief publishing officers at 12 large and small societies, some focused on the humanities and social sciences, others on the STEM fields. We were interested in how the various sources of activity and value for scholarly societies were being impacted…