Paper Title
Academic Conferences in a COVID-19 era: A Path towards Reinvention

Abstract
- The challenges raised by the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020 were by far among the most challenging and uncertain times with a substantial impact on many industries. One such domain was related to academic conferences, where in-person events used to be the standard organizing form. Faced with the impossibility to organize in-person meetings anymore, topped by the interdiction related to across-borders traveling, this industry had to turn to technology to keep on existing. Based on a content analysis approach, the current paper aims to evaluate how academic conferences have changed since the beginning of 2020 and learn from this shift. Significant results show a focus on the new challenges for organizing virtual conferences, significant individual challenges that academics have been going through since the COVID-19 outbreak, and the future of academic conferences that are likely to be focused onorganizing a perfectly balanced hybrid scientific events.All these results point to an industry that,even though it was almost entirely focused on the face-to-face format before the pandemic (mostly because participants valued the most social interaction), found internal resources to shift very fast to and 100% virtual format. Keywords - Academic Conferences, COVID-19, Reinvention