Cover Feature
LASTING LEGACY
Written by Stuart Wood
Fake conferences and profit
margins are driving a wedge
between the academic and
association worlds. AEN meets
the people bridging the gap
using the power of legacy
8
Fake news, real problems
informed event can persuade academics
to relocate to a city, spark innovative ideas
The proliferation of fake conferences is
and build powerful social networks.”
just one of the problems which is causing a
disconnect between the meetings industry
Great power, great responsibility
and the academic world.
These two institutions should be
Another meetings industry player which
fast friends, but many professors and has put the power of legacy front and
researchers view events as needless centre is the ICC Sydney in Australia.
IN OCTOBER 2016, a professor from the distractions or — even worse — as scams. University of Canterbury in New Zealand Thomas Trøst Hansen, who is writing Than a Venue’, and aims to highlight the
submitted a research paper to an academic a pHD on the subject titled ‘ Academic
events (and their impacts)’, says: “The
meetings industry is a key infrastructure
for academia. It’s necessary for a strong
scientific community. But academic
conferencing is severely underdeveloped
when compared to, say, academic
publishing.”
Hansen is partnering with Wonderful
Copenhagen, the tourist board for the
Danish capital, on a new project that is
intended to help bridge the gap. The
Copenhagen Legacy Lab is an initiative that
will use workshops to link together the
organisers of academic association events
with research communities, businesses
and public authorities. It is an attempt to
harness the collective wisdom of everyone
who has already held an association event
in the city of Copenhagen, and use it to
create positive, lasting legacies for those
coming down the pipeline.
“It is important that we can measure
and encourage meaningful legacy from
association events,” says Hansen. “Many
events nowadays talk about legacy, but
what they really mean is putting a beehive
on the roof of a venue, then moving on
to the next one. A well-organised and many benefits that association events
conference – written entirely using the
autocomplete function on his Mac.
Christopher Bartneck, who is an
associate professor at the Human Interface
Technology Laboratory, received an invite
to the ‘International Conference on Atomic
and Nuclear Physics’ – a topic unrelated to
his field.
“Since I have practically no knowledge
of nuclear physics, I resorted to the iOS
autocomplete function to help me write
the paper,” said Bartneck. “I started a
sentence with ‘atomic’ or ‘nuclear’ and
then randomly hit the autocomplete
suggestions. It was titled ‘Atomic energy
will have been made available to a single
source’, and I illustrated it with the first
graphic on the Wikipedia entry for nuclear
physics.”
Bartneck’s completely nonsensical
paper was accepted, because the event
he was invited to was what has been
referred to as a ‘fake conference’. Fake
conferences are commercial ventures
posing as academic or association events,
in the hopes of receiving paper submission
and registration fees from academic
professionals.
www.aenetwork.co.uk
Its latest campaign is titled ‘More
can bring to clients, delegates and the
local community. ICC Sydney CEO Geoff
Donaghy says: “Our dedicated corporate
Patients is a virtue
Involving patients in scientific
congresses can be one way of
ensuring they have a lasting legacy.
This was the topic of a new white
paper by international meetings
organiser AIM Group, which
suggested that involving patients
in the events themselves can
help disseminate information and
increase media coverage.
Author of the White Paper and
head of AIM Group’s Florence
office, Francesca Manzani, said:
“Patients can help raise awareness
of illnesses and catch the attention
of the media due to the human
nature of their stories. The
increased visibility will ultimately
have a positive impact for the
scientific association.”