Guignon V. auteur aut IRD Breton C. auteur aut IRD Mariette J. auteur aut IRD Sabot François auteur aut IRD Fumey J. auteur aut IRD Lefort V. auteur aut IRD Fiston-Lavier A. S. auteur aut IRD text journalArticle eng text/pdf reformatted digital access In 2020, the world faced the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic that drastically altered people's lives. Since then, many countries have been forced to suspend public gatherings, leading to many conference cancellations, postponements, or reorganizations. Switching from a face-to-face to a remote conference became inevitable and the ultimate solution to sustain scientific exchanges at the national and the international levels. The same year, as a committee, we were in charge of organizing the major French annual conference that covers all computational biology areas: The "Journees Ouvertes en Biologie, Informatique et Mathematiques " (JOBIM). Despite the health crisis, we succeeded in changing the conference format from face to face to remote in a very short amount of time. Here, we propose 10 simple rules based on this experience to modify a conference format in an optimized and cost-effective way. In addition to the suggested rules, we decided to emphasize an unexpected benefit of this situation: a significant reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions related to travel for scientific conference attendance. We believe that even once the SARS-CoV-2 crisis is over, we collectively will have an opportunity to think about the way we approach such scientific events over the longer term.</p> specialized 122 021 124 17 10 e1009321 [13 ] 2021 1553-734X https://www.documentation.ird.fr/hor/fdi:010083328 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009321 1553-734X [F B010083328] https://www.documentation.ird.fr/hor/fdi:010083328 https://horizon.documentation.ird.fr/exl-doc/pleins_textes/2021-12/010083328.pdf IRD - Base Horizon / Pleins textes 2021-12-03 2025-02-24 fdi:010083328 fre