Research conferences are part of every academic’s calendar. They provide opportunities to interact with global and national stars in your field, and present early opportunities for new research to be released to an audience of peers.
The typical conference is run by learned societies or research associations, who contract professional conference organisers to handle the grunt work and take their cut. Plenary program speakers are selected by scientific program committees of experienced researchers and the speakers often given free registration and travel support in recognition that their names will be magnets to those attending, boosting attendance.
Another model is the entirely commercial conference business where conference companies select topics that they judge will attract interest and run conferences independent of any scientific body.
IIR Conferences (aka Informa) is Australia and New Zealand’s leading commercial provider of conferences, seminars and portentous sounding “summits”.
In December the seventh Australian Wind Energy Conference will be held in Melbourne. I was invited to speak on the claims of anti-wind farm groups who claim that wind turbines can make people sick. Except for two other Melbourne locals, most of the other listed speakers are senior wind energy company people, government officials and politicians.
Registration is $2995 plus GST — $3294.50 all up. And if you really want to spray your money around, you can purchase the Powerpoints for the two days of plenaries – a snip at $764.50. I’m used to giving my Powerpoints away at conferences.
When I was invited, I asked for my expenses to be paid and they offered to reimburse air fares and taxis and graciously to waive the registration fee. Terrific. I wouldn’t have to pay to hear myself speak.
But they would not pay for two nights in a hotel (I live in Sydney) — maybe $400-600 — because they had “a limited budget”. I said I would not charge a speaker’s fee.
The idea here apparently, is that I and other speakers should effectively put our hands in our pockets to assist the company in their efforts to make lots of money. If they were to get just 100 payers through the door, they would pull $299,000 before selling a single Powerpoint set.
So when they refused to pay my hotel, I withdrew.
As I wrote last year, I’ve received IIR brochures over the years and routinely binned them, wondering about how connected and important an audience would be who would shell out such sums to hear from people you can readily hear at many public sector conferences at a fraction of the price. I’m going to a four-day international conference in Singapore in March where the registration is $620 and the Powerpoints are free.
Last year when invited to speak at one of their meetings, I called three other participants asking the terms on which they are participating. One, when asking for travel was told “As a speaker, you will receive full complimentary access to both days of the conference including all speaker papers, luncheons and networking functions. Speakers are normally asked to cover their own travel expenses” but that they would make an exception with him. However, none I spoke with were getting fees. Some but not all public sector workers are unable to accept fees, making this a nice little honey pot to exploit.
So why do public sector experts give up their valuable time to effectively donate their time and expertise to for-profit companies such as IIR?
And why do they give away their Powerpoints to be sold at such an extravagant cost, seeing that such companies play no role in their content?
CPD?
These for-profit companies are a massive scam.
I work in the NGO sector, where the possibility of dropping $3000 on a conference is way out of the realm of possibility – but that doesn’t stop them from badgering us daily to register. When a colleague was invited to speak at the conference, they had a similar experience to you – they had to pay their own flights and accomodation.
I have been told by someone that used to work with one of these companies that their break-even point for social policy conferences is 7 attendees – any more than that and they are making a profit. Another friend attended one of these national conferences where a whopping 17 people were in attendence.
I agree. Private for profit companies organise numerous conferences, ‘summits’, workshops, forums, etc, on tertiary education which charge similarly exorbitant fees. For some reason I still can’t discern why vice chancellors, deputy vice chancellors and similarly prefixed chancellors agree to speak at these low level events. I would have thought they had much else to do.
I give conference organisers advice on topics and speakers when they ask since I believe public institutions should give advice freely regardless of sector or other interest, but I have long since stopped speaking at or attending these things.
This is an extension of researchers writing, refereeing and editing journal articles for free for private for-profit companies which then charge their libraries or unaffiliated readers very high fees for reading them. At least journals are supported by path dependence, which will hopefully soon be eroded by free digital repositories and journals. There is no such justification for conferences since these for profit conference organisers are rather recent entrants, at least in my discipline.
Why indeed? This pestilence has been around for about 20 years and it remains mystifying. They are incredibly corporate, which of course also means the “conference” will be boring as batsh!t. I assume most of the attendees are corporate types who need to network or need it on their cv that they are seen to be networking. Companies have quite big budgets (relative to academia) for this kind of thing, and the expensive Powerpoints are a record of the conference and also perhaps an excuse for only sending one company man to the conference, or indeed none. (Of course nothing at such a public conference can be “new” or especially worthy because of publishing rules at anywhere worthwhile publishing. So these things are usually out of date. The best conferences have a “no citation” rule for attendees to try to encourage speakers and attendees to spill their latest. Few are really going to do it unless the Nature paper is already due to come out in a few days and Nature have given their permission!)
The last one of this type that I attended was in the mid-90s. As a speaker I was not charged and got the hotel room free (the grand old Renaissance in Washington DC so I suppose it was almost worth it just for this; hmm not really, a hotel is a hotel is a…). But the attendees, mostly outside the field I was speaking on (the human genome) were so dull, I skipped out after my talk. Sometimes they are in interesting locales (I wouldn’t include DC but with NIH in Bethesda it is the largest biomedical research agglomeration on the planet) but the other curiosity about American conferences is that half of them are in places like “Conference Drive, Network Plaza, Dulles” (I think this is a real place). One of those astoundingly dull identikit green-glass light-industrial estates in the middle of no-where, usually close-ish to a major airport–with attached golf links but absolutely zero interest, and no escape.
To pre-empt those who believe academic researchers should not be spending “tax payers money” on fancy conferences in fancy locales: first, the cost differential between the boring ones and the interesting ones is not evident; and second, when you work so hard as most researchers do, often for long stretches without a weekend let alone a real vacation for years, the least one can expect when flying in a metal tube for 12 to 20 hours, is a bit of change and not just more 4 walls of identikit conference hotels that look like a WalMart. Third, to achieve all the supposed benefits of conferencing, the most important thing is to have one’s mind refreshed and this, or networking, does not happen in these soulless places.