Conferences (and related events such as institutional colloquia) have been a key part of scholarly knowledge diffusion for centuries. Prior to the pandemic, practices in these areas have seemed to be quite stable; the pandemic of course forced abrupt and discontinuous change. CNI has been trying to at least anecdotally track some of the developments here, driven by a very strong sense that some of the pandemic-driven changes will be permanent and that the implications of what's happening are poorly understood and mapped. I've touched on this in my December 2020 address at the CNI virtual meeting, for example, and these issues have also come up in our Executive Roundtable explorations of developments in the research enterprise during the pandemic.

Given all of this, I was absolutely thrilled to see the report that Ithaka S+R released today on the future of scholarly meetings, see

COVID-19 and the Future of the Annual Meeting - Ithaka S+R

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 ...

and the Sloan funded follow-on study described at

The Future of Scholarly Meetings - Ithaka S+R

The COVID-19 pandemic forced scholarly societies to reimagine one of their signal offerings: academic conferences. In response, societies experimented 

I'm hoping that we can get a report on this work in our December 2021 CNI events, either virtually or in-person in Washington (with video recording). Finally, I want to just note that while this is a critical issue for scholarly societies, the issues (and our efforts to understand them at CNI) range into a much broader range of scholarly communication events.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNi