Articles
For-Profit Conferences: Evil or Essential?
By Timothy Pratt, PhD
Originally published on ClinPage.com on April 29, 2008
Freedom Of Speech
Vendor presentations (sometimes given by a client or sponsor with a carefully vetted slide deck) run the gamut from high quality (rare), to thinly disguised sales pitches (frequent), to blatant advertorials (all too common). Don't forget that somewhere along the line the consumer of the companies' services (often in the sponsor community) ends up paying for all this.
Why don't the for-profit conference providers stop this? Because this is their business model. But it renders them unable to exercise the same level of discretion over their meetings that societies command.
Quality Control
After all, if a for-profit conference has a vendor who just paid them $100-$500 per minute to speak, are they really going to tell the vendor "you can't say that"? Most of the for-profit conferences, alas, don't seem to have any form of review process in place to ensure the quality of the material presented.
So some attendees end up in a situation where they may suffer through two days of sales pitches and advertorials (for which they paid $1,000-$2,000!) and receive a skewed perspective on the topics presented. The pricing structure necessarily excludes small vendors who may have a better mousetrap or very important concept, but can't afford the fee.
By now, you're probably at least partly agreeing with my thesis. For-profit conferences, if not evil out right, have some significant problems with bias due to their fundamental business model. So do we need them at all? Yes.
The for-profit providers generally deliver highly specialized conferences with a level of detail and insight into our industry that professional societies cannot always match. The societies, serving many thousands of members' needs, pursue multiple objectives and do not specialize in organizing events.
My Gauntlet
How should we address the issues outlined here? One partial solution would be fairly simple. For-profit conferences should put an independent review board in place. My suggestion: spend some of the copious monies these events generate on retaining a subject matter expert (or three) to review proposed presentations. These reviews, ideally, would be blinded, just like the professional society or peer-reviewed journal reviews. That should be a surmountable challenge; we do it all the time on the editorial advisory board of Applied Clinical Trials, on which I serve for free.
My challenge-to the for-profit conference universe; and I hope you will join me in this-is to put review boards in place for the good of the industry. Such boards will improve the integrity of their product, and facilitate the unbiased exchange of a diversity of ideas. While it's arguable some of these events are evil, given the demands for ransom to appear at the podium, they are also essential. For-profit meetings simply need to be reformed. Here I stand-I can do no other.
