MedChemTrain e‐School 2020: Event Highlights and Insights into Virtual Symposium Organization

Abstract

Virtual events are flourishing with the world lockdown due to the COVID‐19 pandemic. As a result of the cancelation or postponement of scheduled physical meetings, a revolution in medicinal chemistry scientific meetings occurred, leading to an increase in new strategies to share science. One example are online events, namely e‐schools or webinars. Taking this into consideration, we decided to promote the MedChemTrain e‐School 2020, a virtual event aiming to bring together the scientific community and share some updates in the medicinal chemistry field. After organizing this free event, with more than 1.4 thousand participants worldwide, we decided to share some insights about the logistics behind organizing a virtual symposium to help scientists with this new challenge in science communication.

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“…Some authors claim that although virtual environments are suitable for building trust in technical aspects, they are less ideal for developing more lasting and more profound trust forms [25]. Even so, we believe that virtual events will continue to be viable, even after the end of the quarantine, and the scientific community seems to agree, as can be seen by the recent exponential increase in the number of these events [45].…”

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“…However, when faced with the ongoing Covid-19 crisis in Europe and Germany in the early planning stage of the conference, we decided to move the format from completely on-site to fully online. This move was not unprecedented, as several entirely online conferences already existed [2], established on-site conferences switched to an online format [3][4][5], or novel online formats emerged [6,7]. Advantages of online conferences are numerous and have recently been summarized by Roos et al [2], and include low costs, as no venue or catering has to be organized, environmental friendliness, with onsite conferences producing considerably more carbon dioxide and waste than online ones due to long-distance travelling [8][9][10][11], and time efficacy, as participants may join or opt-out from any talk they would like to listen or not listen to at a whim and can concentrate, e.g., on child care.…”