a mailing list or on specialized online services. Contributions are usually submitted using an online abstract or paper management service. Increasingly, there has been a call for more sustainable academic conferencing, as flying to and consumption at conferences is one of the largest components of an academics environmental footprint. However, few conferences have enacted practices to reduce their environmental impact, despite guidelines being widely available. An analysis of academic conferences taking place in 2016, showed that only 4% of 116 conferences sampled offered carbon offset options and only 9% of these conferences implemented any form of action to their reduce environmental impact. Predatory conferences Predatory conferences or predatory meetings are meetings set up to appear as legitimate scientific conferences but which are exploitative as they do not provide proper editorial control over presentations, and advertising can include claims of involvement of prominent academics who are, in fact, uninvolved. They are an expansion of the predatory publishing business model, which involves the creation of academic publications built around an exploitative business model that generally involves charging publication fees to authors without providing the editorial and publishing services associated with legitimate journals. BIT Life Sciences and SCIgen § In conferences are some of the conferences labeled as predatory. Environmental impact Academic conferences are criticized for being environmentally unfriendly, due to the amount of airplane traffic generated by them. A correspondence on Nature.com points out the "paradox of needing to fly to conferences" despite increased calls for sustainability by environmental scientists. The academic community's Carbon footprint is comprised in large parts by emissions caused by air travel. Critique of in-person conferences In-person conferences suffer from a number of issues. Most importantly, they are fostering the existing social inequality in academia due to their inaccessibility for researchers from low income countries, researchers with care duties or researchers facing visa restrictions. See also References External links