My opinion
 

By Dr. Deepak Gupta
Corresponding Author Dr. Deepak Gupta
Wayne State University, - United States of America 48201
Submitting Author Dr. Deepak Gupta
ECONOMICS OF MEDICINE

Honorariums, Medical-Conferences, Medical-Journals, Organizing-Team-Members, Organizing-Secretary, Editors

Gupta D. Honorariums: How can they be so difficult to devise?. WebmedCentral ECONOMICS OF MEDICINE 2016;7(12):WMC005244

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License(CC-BY), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
No
Submitted on: 17 Dec 2016 02:41:22 PM GMT
Published on: 21 Dec 2016 04:06:55 PM GMT

Abstract


Honorariums (for organizing conferences and for managing journals): How can they be so difficult to devise? As only zilch comes free and nobody wants their conferences or their journals to be zilches, the society should decide and conclude to invariably pay their organizers and their editors unless the society keeps coming up short in the education/research funds wherein the society can decide to cut down the number of conferences and journals (to manageably numbered which can be comfortably paid) instead of expecting the organizers and the editors (of innumerable conferences and journals) to do the work for free.

Perspective


First thing's first: NEITHER I am or have been or am planning to be an editor of any journal NOR a part of any organizing team of conferences. Once this aspect has been clarified at the outset, I, being a doctor of medicine, can focus at the primary objective of writing this perspective: Honorariums (for organizing conferences and for managing journals [1-5]). How can they be so difficult to devise? Unless I am wrong or have misinterpreted or am completely unaware of the circumstances, wherein the organizing teams' individuals or the editorial teams' individuals are actually getting paid for their time and their energy when put into the corresponding conferences and the corresponding journals. Herein, I am NOT talking about powerful yet covert privileges (say name and fame) of being an organizer or an editor. Rather, I am focusing on the overt yet equalizer privilege called money. It is as simple as that: As only zilch comes free and nobody wants their conferences or their journals to be zilches, the society should decide and conclude to invariably pay their organizers and their editors unless the society keeps coming up short in the education/research funds wherein the society can decide to cut down the number of conferences and journals (to manageably numbered which can be comfortably paid) instead of expecting the organizers and the editors (of innumerable conferences and journals) to do the work for free.

Is it so hard to envisage that the highly skilled "workers" should be getting paid for their "complex" work of organizing medical conferences and managing medical journals? Even if it is almost always a part-time work, the work-hours put into completing the part-time jobs' tasks are of no less worth than the work-hours put into completing the full-time jobs' duties. Moreover, the organizers and the editors would have to be officially recruited when the reimbursement packages have been defined, and this formalization of the process would remove the voluntariness that defines and decides the zeal and the motives of the people currently getting involved in the "zilch comes free" processes of organizing conferences and managing journals. Who knows whether the absence of overt and clear-cut reimbursement packages might have left the field wide-open (presumably/probably or presumedly/supposedly) for the organizers' conscience and the editors' conscience to potentially consider the loop-holes for shady/shadowy exploitations of the funds being generated during the conferences and for the journals.

In simple words, as only zilch comes free, time has come to recognize the thankless works and the non-reimbursed hours put up by the "altruistic" conference-organizers and journal-editors; and this recognition and appreciation needs to be formulated as compensations in the monetary terms which has the universal appeal wherein the society can't expect more than what it is paying for while the altruists can't claim more than what they are working at. Even though I am neither one, the organizers and the editors of the present and the future should NOT feel denigrated when raising this valid concern; rather they should ask for pre-determined appropriate honorariums before they take up the arduous tasks of organizing conferences and managing journals. The irony could be that when the conference organizing teams and the journal production teams devised their plans to organize conferences and to manage journals, their original intent all the time might have been to reap profits; however, the pseudo-inculcation of the "enforced" altruism (due to primary underlying thought process being "giving" education) has created the scenarios wherein the team members of the same teams (organizers and editors) have to ask for honorariums (or in raw-words, their shares of the profits). The bottom line is that whenever work is treated as a clearly-defined business enterprise, the people involved in the team know their roles better and their teams last longer while maintaining economic viability as well as ethical veracity. Hopefully, the society should NOT try to forget that as only zilch comes free, inadvertently creating zilches may be easy even though NOT warranted and definitely NOT sustainable.

References


  1. Medium.com/TEDx-Experience How to Organize a Conference: 18 Amazingly Useful Tips https://medium.c om/tedx-experience/how-to-organize-a-conference-567fb50ccdbd Last Accessed on November 23, 2016
  2. OkDork.com How to Organize a Conference: How We Made Over $100,000 http://okdork.com/2010/ 09/01/how-we-made-over-100k-doing-tech-events/ Last Accessed on November 23, 2016
  3. ASAHQ.org American Society of Anesthesiologists: Annual Reports https://www.asahq.org/resources/p ublications/annual-reports Last Accessed on November 23, 2016
  4. ASAnet.org Letter of Agreement: The Council of the American Sociological Association (ASA) http://www.asanet.org/sites/default/files/savvy/images/journals/docs/pdf/letter-of-agreement.pdf Last Accessed on November 23, 2016
  5. APA.org American Psychological Association: Association Rules — 170. Publications and Communications http://www.apa.org/about/governance /bylaws/rules-170.aspx Last Accessed on November 23, 2016.

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