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We are currently working with a wide range of life science societies and individual conferences to help them increase the visibility of their posters and slide presentations (International Society of Computational Biology, Ecological Society of America and the Organisation for Human Brain Mapping to name but a few). Some of our collaborators have their poster and slide content grouped neatly into our Channels, which provides a unified space for conference attendees to find and share their work more easily.

A recent example is a channel we created for the Species on the Move (SOTM) Conference that took place on 9th – 12th February: https://www.speciesonthemove.com/. The conference focused on the global redistribution of our planet’s species in reaction to climate change and how this provides us with the opportunity to deepen our understanding of biogeography, evolutionary ecology and macroecology. Through our streamlined submission form, presenters of the SOTM conference were able to upload their posters and slides in a matter of minutes. Once uploaded, posters and slides are published instantly upon submission, and after a brief check from the editorial team they are assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), making them fully citeable.

Presenting posters at a conference is a great way to encourage networking, however presenters often fail to tap into the wider, global community as they are limited to in-conference exposure. There are vast numbers of posters displayed at conferences, and as such, few people tend to have the time to actively engage with them.

Putting your presentation online helps to increase dissemination of research and provides a far wider reach for interaction with peers.

There are logistical barriers that limit the length of poster sessions at a meeting, so conferences tend to make their abstract book available online post-event. Abstracts can be restrictive in terms of the amount of usable information that they provide, failing to highlight any relevant points for discussion and stagnating further peer communication. As you can see in the example to the left, we publish the full poster file (and make it available for download) and provide the opportunity to add a description, where the presenter can detail the poster’s aim and purpose. It is easy to cite and link the poster out to a variety of social media sites, giving the presenters the chance to extend the visibility of their work even after the conference has taken place. Following on from this, if the research is written up as a full article at a later date, authors have the ability to go back and include a link to the related work.

 

Our channel pages have been designed to help users locate and engage with topics of interest, using our filter by ‘subjects’ and ‘topics’ fields. Societies and conferences that hold multiple meetings also benefit from hosting their content in a single channel, as there is a filter by conference field, meaning that users can drill down into specific conference material if they wish.

The SOTM conference is currently benefiting from all that our poster and slide channels provide, and we believe that all conferences should be looking to extend their reach and contribute to the dissemination of important scientific work. Hosting conference presentations in an F1000Research channel is really easy and quick to set up, so if you are interested in setting one up just contact our editorial team to find out more!