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Organising a conference is no mean feat. In order to make a conference a success, an organising committee must invest a great deal of time and dedication to nurture the ‘perfect’ conference. The conference must be logistically sound, have an attractive and interactive itinerary whilst still allowing for socialising to encourage the exchanging of ideas. Then there are the administrative duties, the intricacies of the meeting infrastructure and the need to cater for stomachs as well as brains! It’s tough.

To put all of this into place, there is the inevitable challenge of sourcing sufficient funds. Especially for the smaller meetings, sponsorship from external sources is usually necessary to help keep the registration fees low enough to encourage attendees and to help defray costs for those who would need further support such as graduates and researchers from less wealthy countries.

Since the start of the year, we at Faculty of 1000 have been offering poster prizes (mainly for young investigators and post-docs) for conferences organised by our Faculty Members and affiliated societies in the hope that this would help relieve some of the financial burden and also make their already busy lives just a little bit easier.

The prizes comprise three things:

1. A year’s personal subscription to F1000Prime – any award winner is clearly somebody who takes their research seriously and has excelled in their work. In order to harness this enthusiasm, we provide them with their own personal access to F1000Prime recommendations so that they can keep up to date with the top articles in the literature, and help in supplementing ongoing projects.
2. A free submission to F1000Research – we provide the winners with the opportunity to publish their work rapidly with no hassle, giving them quick priority on their work, and enabling everyone in the field to benefit from their work right away.
3. A Faculty of 1000 certificate – because it’s nice to have a hard copy of the achievement for the award winner’s record and curriculum vitae.

This initiative has been well received and thus far, and we have already provided awards for many international conferences and workshops. These include an EMBO practical course at the MRC Centre for Developmental Neurobiology which was organised by Faculty Member Corinne Houart , and one of our affiliate societies, the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) at their annual ISMB conference Berlin (see pictures below).

As this has proven to be a popular initiative and conference organisers have been pleased with the support they have received, we thought this would be a great time to open up this opportunity up to others. If you are organising a conference in the near future and would like Faculty of 1000 to support you with poster prizes, please get in contact with us at publishers@f1000.com.