ASMS: A Digital Solution

As the scale of the COVID-19 pandemic became clear this spring, we quickly saw that we could not hold our annual ASMS Conference on Mass Spectrometry & Allied Topics in its usual face-to-face format. Due to take place in Houston, Texas, on June 1, we had to evaluate new options quickly: do we cancel the conference, postpone it until fall, or move it completely online?

After much discussion, the Board decided to shift our program online, reasoning that we could still share science and maintain engagement without physical meeting. ASMS is a large conference, typically with 6,000 to 7,000 attendees spanning diverse disciplines. A good number of attendees come every year, not just to present and see great science, but also to connect and engage with colleagues and friends. But how can we foster that engagement online? 

It was clear that we couldn’t simply move our standard conference schedule online, with eight parallel oral sessions every morning and afternoon, and around 750 poster presentations per day. Thus, we planned the ASMS 2020 Reboot (see https://www.asms.org/conferences/asms-2020-reboot), with all talks and posters to be presented in a virtual and interactive format from June 1 to June 12. Plenary lectures, tutorials, and award lectures will all be held as live webinars, as will 40 interactive workshops. These live events will be recorded and made available for three months as on-demand content (along with any other conference content), and each of the 64 oral sessions will have a "watch party" feature, including a live Q&A webinar with the speakers. The live conference program will be bookended each day with corporate events, giving attendees a look at the latest instrument developments. The week after the presentations and posters, we will hold thirteen short courses.

There are enormous challenges involved in shifting a face-to-face conference into an online format – made all the more daunting because we had only a few weeks to make it happen! It would have been much easier to cancel the conference, or postpone it, but the remarkable ASMS staff rose wonderfully to the occasion. With input from the ASMS Board, we were able to put together the online conference in record time.

A particular challenge was working out how to provide attendees with access to the online program content in a secure manner – we repurposed our mobile app and desktop planner program for this purpose since these are familiar tools for our community. We also added the option for attendees to submit questions to oral and poster authors (authors can publish the questions and provide answers), or request more info from authors. We also had to go about refunding all the face-to-face conference registration fees, while simultaneously opening registration for the new online conference (at a quarter of the normal registration fee).

The response of our presenters, individual and corporate members, and attendees has been overwhelmingly positive. Even though some presenters had to modify or withdraw their presentations since they were unable to finish gathering their planned data, others submitted new presentations for the online conference – so it all worked out in the end.
 

Of course, there are components of the face-to-face conference that can’t be moved online. How do you host an opening mixer for thousands of online attendees, for example? And the planned finale event in the Houston Museum of Natural Science doesn’t translate well to an online format – at least in part because of the inevitable lack of food, wine, and beer to share…  But we’ve done our best to move most of our conference and engagement activities into the digital realm.

Everyone is looking forward to a return to face-to-face conferences (ASMS 2021 will be in Philadelphia next June), but some of the features developed for the ASMS 2020 Reboot may be preserved for future events – online or otherwise. We’ve offered attendees the opportunity to watch the recorded oral presentations and look over the posters online for months after the conference for a number of years. This year we’re encouraging poster presenters to record a 3-minute “flash talk” video to accompany their online poster – perhaps we can offer that option at face-to-face poster presentations, too. We’d love to hear your feedback during and after the event (send this to [email protected]) – what worked seamlessly, what fell flat, and what you would like to see become a regular fixture.

It’s always stimulating to think about how we can best showcase brilliant science and provide opportunities to network and engage. The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown obstacles in our path, but we encourage others who are planning (or re-planning) conferences to be creative in their approach. We hope to see you (virtually) there from June 1!