Promises and perils of the conference paper
‘This session will produce a collaboratively written paper, to be submitted to a relevant peer-reviewed journal’. How often have we all seen, or written, statements like this? Appending them vaguely, yet hopefully, to the end of a conference session description.
Ah, ‘the conference session paper’, one of the most widely discussed but relatively infrequently encountered creatures in the academic publishing ecosystem.
It is easy to take a pessimistic stance, that the expressed desire to produce a piece of valuable academic insight with a group of relative strangers stems from the overwhelming pressure for publication across much of academia. That it is grounded in external expectation rather than an inquisitive, hopeful reality. However, it recently dawned on me — probably while writing a statement like the one above! — that I’d had the great opportunity to be part of several successful conference publication efforts. Each of them took its own particular route into the world, emerging in different shapes and forms, and I hope that sharing them might bring both amusement and insight.
I may have had a lucky start. My first experience was at the Ecosystem Services Partnership Conference in Stellenbosch, 2015. During one of the conference sessions, I happened to put my name down on a list to stay connected with the ‘integrated valuation’ enthusiasts that I had spent the previous hours in a session with. From this emerged discussion, draft text and, seemingly semi-magically, the publication ‘A new valuation school’ in 2016. I was in a state of mild shock. Did all conference sessions actually magically morph into academic publications?
In my experience that followed, resoundingly: no. With the greatest will in the world, there are so many reasons why insights and inspired conversations emerging during conference sessions never see the light of day in a paper. Primarily, it is difficult to know how to wrangle these strange multi-author beasts, bringing in insights from contributors separated by space and time, who may only have met on one occasion for a few hours. With so many other demands on us, these nascent papers are often relegated to the shadowy recesses of the ‘work in progress’ file. In the case of ‘A new valuation school’, the paper rode high on a wave of existing connections between some of the authors, the seed of a working group on the topic in the Ecosystem Services Partnership and the opportunity for a piece on such a topic to lead a special issue. As always, there are many factors that can shape a paper’s fate!
After this first experience, I lived out a few glorious, but conference paper free years… or so I had thought.
I attended Transformations 2017, a 3-day conference in the balmy late summer of Dundee, Scotland with little idea that I would become part of a peer-reviewed publication co-created by 183 authors! It is one thing to produce a paper of a conference session, quite another to craft one from a conference in its entirety. This publication reported on a range of different activities undertaken by participants at the conference, which was tailored towards engagement with a “novel futures-oriented and participatory approach” called ‘3 horizons’. Novel in its approach and implementation and endeavouring to capture the collective thought leadership of the Transformations research community, the paper presented some special challenges of its own. I can be quite sure that writing, editing and reaching consensus on the final draft took up many hours of the lead authors lives. ‘Transforming knowledge systems for life on Earth’ was published in Autumn 2020.
As this paper was working its steady way through the publishing aether, I got involved in an interactive session at the Ecosystem Services Partnership (ESP) European Conference 2018 held in Donostia / San Sebastián, Spain: ‘The IPBES experience — advancing ES thinking?’ This session was designed to get people talking about, and reflecting on, their personal understanding of and experience with IPBES. Once again, at the end of the session I scribbled my name on the ‘I would be interested to help turn this into a publication’ list but didn’t hold my breath. Many months later, through various twists of fate (including, perhaps most obviously, being identified as someone already writing on science-policy interface issues!) I found myself as co-lead author of a piece, tasked with crafting something that 23 co-authors could happily sign up to. And you know what? It was great. While bringing with it a whole set of issues around representation and consensus and the basic admin challenges of all working on drafts and revisions at the same time, the overall experience was very positive. Buoyed by supportive and accommodating co-authors, with helpfully critical and helpfully constructure comments, the effort ultimately resulted in another successful publication: Improving collaboration between ecosystem service communities and the IPBES science-policy platform.
So, there you have it. My short, but adventure-packed journey so far through the world of the conference paper. By way of a summary, here are some of the most valuable lessons I have taken from these experiences:
Always put your name on ‘the list’ — you might choose not to be involved at a later point, but, as the saying goes: ‘you have to be in it to win it’
Be responsive — the days and weeks immediately after the session are usually the critical moment in deciding whether anything will follow and who will be involved and a key time to share any enthusiasm you have
Be clear on your contribution — ask yourself: How interested are you in the topic? How much time do you have to contribute? Do you want to lead the piece? Make sure you have a clear idea of what you can give to these activities and communicate this from the beginning
Enjoy the ride — when post-conference conversations continue, they can take you in all kinds of wonderful directions, whether or not they result in a paper
REFERENCES
Jacobs, S et al. (2016). A new valuation school: integrating diverse values of nature in resource and land use decisions. Ecosystem Services, 22, 213–220. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoser.2016.11.007
Fazey, I. et al. (2020). Transforming knowledge systems for life on Earth: Visions of future systems and how to get there. Energy Research & Social Science, 70, 101724. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2020.101724
Transforming knowledge systems for life on Earth: From producing knowledge about our world to generating wisdom about how to act within it https://actionresearchplus.com/transforming-knowledge-systems-for-life-on-earth-from-producing-knowledge-about-our-world-to-generating-wisdom-about-how-to-act-within-it/
C.-L. Washbourne et al. (2020) Improving collaboration between ecosystem service communities and the IPBES science-policy platform. Ecosystems and People, 16:1, 165–174. https://doi.org/10.1080/26395916.2020.1766573
