A disagreement between the members of the Board who hold the largest annual meeting of HIV / AIDS in North America led to his site Web used to go very dark in early July and confusion where the conference will take place in 2014.
20-year-old Conference on retroviruses and opportunistic infections (CROI) draws up 4,000 researchers worldwide, and its Web-Site rich archive summaries, webcasts and podcasts is becoming a go-to place for researchers, community advocates, historians and journalists. The non-profit Foundation CROI and earnings-CROI LLC put on the meeting, and the dispute involves a falling out between the two groups. "I am not allowed by our confidential agreement to disclose anything," said Chairman of the Foundation Board CROI Constance Benson, a researcher on HIV / AIDS at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD ). "We have reached an impasse this past two years on various issues and decided we needed to go in a different direction."
CROI LLC is led by Melissa Sordyl, co-founder of secretariat of the meeting and conference, who also served on the board of the Foundation CROI with a group of high-powered researchers on HIV / AIDS. in an email, Sordyl explained that "LLC is CROI secretariat of the conference and that is why the site is more active. " She said that the confidentiality agreement has also limited its ability to discuss details.
husband Benson, UCSD HIV / AIDS clinician and researcher Robert Schooley, launched CROI with Sordyl after the US government began to restrict travel of its scientists international conferences in the early 190s several revolutionary discoveries were announced at the meeting over the years, including the successful combinations of antiviral drugs, the origins of HIV and cure of Timothy Brown. According CROI Foundation tax returns to the Internal Revenue Service in 2010, it became a big business, with nearly $ 8.9 million in net assets. (It is not clear from the reports how much tax CROI LLC has received payment for his services.)
defenders of HIV / AIDS in particular lobbied CROI Foundation to resurrect the site quickly. "CROI is established as the most important scientific meeting on HIV and commitment to the site is unprecedented in the medical field and should be a model for other diseases," writes Simon Collins, co-founder of information HIV treatment in the UK i-Site base in an e-mail to others in the advocacy community. "The website is a vital resource not only as a record of previous meetings, but as a free research tool, freely accessible. i-Base, and many other community organizations, goes to considerable effort to include links to abstracts, posters, presentations and webcasts in our reports. The reliability of the original URL is a key aspect of the site. The lack of communication is not helpful. "
Benson said CROI Foundation has partnered with the International Antiviral Society-USA, a non-profit headquartered in San Francisco, California, which will serve the new secretariat and organize the meeting . Benson said they will announce later today that the meeting will take place from 3 to March 6 Boston. regarding the site, Benson says they want to restart as soon as possible, but it is not known how archival documents, which CROI LLC owns, appear. "We are going ahead with the setting regardless of the content we have on the new site," Benson said. "We are in discussion about what can be done to restore the previous materials on site."
* Clarification, July 29, 19:05: This article has been updated to explain why the site went dark.
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