Statement regarding the EAS2022

The EAS wishes to respond to some of the comments that have been circulating on social media on the organisation of our annual meetings.

EAS2021 was attended by over 2000 scientists, with about 1/3 of those EAS members. The post-attendance survey, which was filled in by close to 20% of the attendees, included the question "If the EAS offered an option to virtually participate in a real-life EAS2022 annual meeting, scheduled to take place in Valencia, which option would you choose?". The hybrid option was preferred by 16% of respondents - the 1/6 figure quoted in Nature Astronomy.

That percentage dropped to 12% for students and 14% for postdocs, and increased to 30% for tenured staff, suggesting that in our community the hybrid option was in fact more attractive for senior astronomers who already have well established networks of collaborators. The presence of 600+ students in Valencia is further evidence of the interest early-career researchers have in in-person meetings.

Organising a very large conference, with multiple parallel sessions, is a considerable effort. The EAS is a small society, and - like the IAU GA, AAS, COSPAR - hires outside help for this task. The EAS annual meeting fees are in line or even lower than those for other meetings of similar size, indicating that service providers hired for this purpose represent a good value for the society and meeting attendees.

We stand by our estimates for the cost of deploying a full hybrid meeting, based on input from the venue. Smaller meetings with a handful of parallel sessions may be able to full hybrid on a best effort basis, with volunteer labour, but is not possible for a meeting of the scale of EAS2022, which requires large, professional venues.

Offering the hybrid option in those settings is expensive and complicated, as our sister organisations have also found. This is reflected in their registration fees, where for example the AAS, IAU or COSPAR now charge ~60-80% of the in person rate for online attendance. We intend to expand our hybrid offer, and, as conference venues develop this capability, we hope to be able to offer full hybrid access at future EAS annual meetings.

We will not engage on this matter on social media, but are happy to discuss this and other topics with our members during the 2022 General Assembly, on Wednesday at 15:40 CEST.