Value of Meetings Is Far from Abstract

Abstract

It’s that time of year again—if you aren’t at a meeting, you are preparing to go to a meeting or submitting an abstract for a meeting or reading about all the meetings you will miss. Naturally, most of us have to pick and choose where to spend our travel budgets and how best to leverage our time away from our practices and laboratories. Meetings are vital for keeping up-to-date with the rapid advances in the practice of neuro-oncology and the scientific breakthroughs that engender those advances. On a practical level, nothing can replace the face-to-face contact that comes from attending professional conferences and seminars, and many successful collaborations have originated in the chance (or not so chance) conversations that occurred at a reception or outside the meeting room after a particularly lively Q&A during a scientific session. As editors, we take the opportunity of a good conference to hear what you are working on and seeing in your research, the problems you face as clinicians— in short, the questions you are trying to answer and the questions you need answered to guide your work. But because you cannot be at every meeting, we feel it is important for Neuro-Oncology to give you the opportunity to at least get a feel for the “meeting space” by showcasing the abstracts of the oral presentations and posters from some key venues. For instance, the International Symposium on Pediatric Neuro-Oncology, now in its thirteenth iteration, has worked with this journal many times in the past to facilitate publication of its meeting abstracts. This year’s offerings begin on page 369 and faithfully reflect the full spectrum of the symposium’s technical and scientific program (a program that is unique in its ability to include first-hand accounts of patients’ and families’ experiences of pediatric CNS cancers). Later this year, we will publish abstracts from the Eighth Congress of the European Association of Neuro-Oncology (EANO), which is being held in Barcelona. EANO is, of course, one of our sponsoring societies and so has premier access to our pages. Likewise, this fall you will receive an issue that contains all the meeting abstracts for SNO 2008, which is being held in Las Vegas, Nevada, in November. This year’s meeting is anticipated to be bigger and better than ever, with updated presentation categories (to reflect the evolving science) and a new feature: Select Poster Review sessions, which will feature the top-rated posters for attendee review and related discussion by an invited speaker. We still hope to bump into you at a meeting, but if you cannot make it, we hope that giving you access to the abstracts will still help you gain some of the advantages of attending by keeping you up-to-date on the cutting-edge work that hasn’t quite reached the manuscript stage and that otherwise might not make it into our pages at all.