On Tuesday, I attended this workshop and I really enjoyed it a lot. The difference with other workshops? This workshop was by invitation (open to all the particpiants in the ASE PC Board meeting taking place the day after) so no call for papers, no publications of any kinds of proceedings, no restriction on the topics to talk about, no nothing.
For me, the key aspect was the fact that authors were not there to talk about any specific paper. In general, most workshops work by publishing a call for papers and you must submit a paper to the workshop in order to be able to do a presentation in the workshop. Too often, this results in a workshop full of delta papers (i.e. papers that are just a minor improvement wrt previous papers) quickly written to justify the attendance to the workshop. The problem is that, then, during the workshop, authors feel obliged to talk about that specific paper instead of taking the opportunity to have a more open discussion which results in boring and uninteresting presentations.
I’d like to see more workshops going back to their original mission: be a place for discussion and exchange of ideas, instead of becoming mini conferences!
Isn’t it about
for the participant : “yet another publication in my CV” ? (albeit small) and “I need to be able to justify the travel to my funding institution”
for the organized : “I need some money to organize the workshop : if it just looks like a meeting, how can I get some money to help organization” and “I there are proceedings, won’t it look better on my CV as an organizer, i.e. as a scientific selector of the papers published there ?”.
I agree with your post, but my remark tries underline the following point : many small actions in research aim at promoting one’s image and getting money for one’s actions (one = one person, one group, one lab, one university,..). This does not always correlate very positively to the gradient of creating and broadcasting new knowledge. I think this is broadly (though not loudly) recognized, but excused as “it is ways of obtaining means for achieving better science in the following phase, and we need to do it, because this is how the system goes”.
Marc, you´re right on how the research works. It’s just I´m getting tired of that. And I believe at least some small changes are feasible and do not require any kind of revolution. Let´s start with these ones 🙂