Ten Simple Rules for Organizing a Scientific Meeting

Scientific meetings come in various flavors—from one-day focused workshops of 1–20 people to large-scale multiple-day meetings of 1,000 or more delegates, including keynotes, sessions, posters, social events, and so on. These ten rules are intended to provide insights into organizing meetings across the scale. Scientific meetings are at the heart of a scientist's professional life since they provide an invaluable opportunity for learning, networking, and exploring new ideas. In addition, meetings should be enjoyable experiences that add exciting breaks to the usual routine in the laboratory. Being involved in organizing these meetings later in your career is a community responsibility. Being involved in the organization early in your career is a valuable learning experience [1]. First, it provides visibility and gets your name and face known in the community. Second, it is useful for developing essential skills in organization, management, team work, and financial responsibility, all of which are useful in your later career. Notwithstanding, it takes a lot of time, and agreeing to help organize a meeting should be considered in the context of your need to get your research done and so is also a lesson in time management. What follows are the experiences of graduate students in organizing scientific meetings with some editorial oversight from someone more senior (PEB) who has organized a number of major meetings over the years. The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) Student Council [2] is an organization within the ISCB that caters to computational biologists early in their career. The ISCB Student Council provides activities and events to its members that facilitate their scientific development. From our experience in organizing the Student Council Symposium [3],[4], a meeting that so far has been held within the context of the ISMB [5],[6] and ECCB conferences, we have gained knowledge that is typically not part of an academic curriculum and which is embodied in the following ten rules.