What is it about?
When academic conferences moved online in 2020, the format change was expected to improve accessibility. Remote attendance removed travel costs, visa barriers, and some disability-related obstacles. But access alone does not produce inclusion. A group of roughly 100 contributors from the OHBM Open Science Special Interest Group examined what went wrong and what worked in early online conferences. We found that many events simply replicated the in-person format on Zoom, ignoring the distinct affordances and limitations of online participation: time zone conflicts, screen fatigue, lack of informal interaction, and unequal access to stable internet. The paper provides concrete recommendations for conference organizers: asynchronous content delivery, multiple time zone scheduling, captioning, reduced session density, and explicit codes of conduct adapted for online spaces. These recommendations draw on direct experience organizing Brainhack and OHBM events.
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Why is it important?
Many academic societies have adopted permanent hybrid or online conference formats. The design choices made now will affect participation patterns for years. Moving a conference online does not automatically make it inclusive. Without deliberate design, online events can create new barriers (time zones, internet quality, platform accessibility) while removing old ones (travel cost, visas). The recommendations in this paper address both sides. The paper also documents what worked in practice at specific events (Brainhack, OHBM 2020), providing evidence-based guidance rather than theoretical recommendations.
Perspectives
I contributed to this paper as part of the OHBM open science community. When conferences went online, there was genuine optimism, but also a lot of naive assumptions about what "accessible" means in practice. The collaborative writing process itself was an exercise in the principles we were advocating. With roughly 100 authors across every time zone and career stage, we had to practice what we preached about asynchronous collaboration and inclusive communication. The paper is less about technology and more about intentional design. The tools for inclusive online events exist; the question is whether organizers use them.
Rohit Goswami
University of Iceland
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Centering inclusivity in the design of online conferences—An OHBM–Open Science perspective, GigaScience, August 2021, Oxford University Press (OUP),
DOI: 10.1093/gigascience/giab051.
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