I went to the annual meeting of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution (SMBE) this past summer. While at SMBE 2013 I saw several oral presentations, and perused through the posters, when I wasn't presenting my own. I had a conversation with a PI who said something to the effect of, "I won't attend a conference unless I am giving a talk."
Okay, well, I suppose once one has obtained the level of status where talk invitations are constantly rolling in the door, I can understand being choosy about the presentation style for a conference. But, presumably, this PI will still have students and postdocs who will want to attend the conference, share their science, and get feedback on current projects. And most of those people will likely not have the prestige of giving a talk. So, how else to scientists share their results?
Posters!!
Too many posters.
But, a drawback of giving a posters is that, despite the larger potential audience, it often seems like few people care as much about learning from posters as they do from talks. Part of this may be the assumption that all the "best" research was chosen for an oral presentation. C'mon, though, we're all in science. We know how arbitrary the talk selections can be. Another part, however, is that it is simply overwhelming to walk into a conference venue with 2000+ posters lined up. A lot of things might happen:
- You simply don't have time to make it to all the posters you want to view.
- Even if you have the time to stop by every poster you want to look at, the presenter might be busy with other people, or away talking to other people.
- The titles you read through might not have captured the essence of the poster, resulting in overlooking a poster you might have really been interested in.
After the conference, what happens to the posters? Sometimes they are brought back to labs and placed in the hallways. Sometimes they are abandoned at the conference site. And sometimes they're just resigned to join a roll of "previous posters", where eventually the paper will be recycled.
But, there's another option now.
Sharing posters on FigShare
I decided that from now on I will also post pdf files of my posters on FigShare. Now, if you can't make it to my poster, or didn't attend the conference, or didn't even know you were interested in it, you can check out my posters! I think it would be wonderful if conferences started encouraging participants to upload versions of their posters to FigShare, and then compiling them for conference participants to skim prior to attending the meeting.
Another great feature of FigShare is that you can link to relevant material (and update when it becomes available). So for each of these, I linked either to the published version of the paper, or to the arXiv submission.
Below are links to three recent posters (including an upcoming presentation):
- Wilson Sayres MA, Shankey Pander R, and Azad R. Detecting evolutionary strata on the human X chromosome: Markov segmentation and clustering analysis. Poster at American Society of Human Genetics 2013 Meeting, Boston, MA, October 2013
- Wilson Sayres MA, Lohmueller K, and Nielsen R. Natural selection reduced diversity on human Y chromosomes. Poster at Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution 2013. Chicago, IL, July 2013.
- Wilson Sayres MA and Makova KD. Learning from genetic fossils on the human Y chromosome. Poster at Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution 2012. Dublin, Ireland, June 2012.
I'm glad FigShare is stepping up for this... I tried to get funding to do a full-on digital poster service, but it was too practical for funding. http://www.skolr.org/
ReplyDeleteI was half-joking with someone at this year's SMBE that it won't be long before posters are all digital (the joking part was that they were complaining about having to make posters so far in advance, and I said that digital posters would allow presenters to wait until the last minute, just like talks).
ReplyDeleteHi, nice to see someone else sees the need of centrally hosting poster and slide presentations from scientific meetings!
ReplyDeleteFirstly, Figshare is a great tool to host and share a variety of things such as data sets, pre-prints and indeed presented conference material - I'm a big fan! However, if you were unaware, there is a more specific place to host conference posters and slides and that is F1000Posters (http://f1000.com/posters).
F1000Posters is an open access repository for posters and slides in biology and medicine, which offers a permanent structured environment to keep researchers' work visible long after a meeting and maximize the return on the time, effort and money invested in creating each presentation.
We cover hundreds of international meetings and we have received strong support from presenters journals and societies alike. We believe extending the visibility of posters/slides allows those who weren't able to see the research or attend the meeting the opportunity to view the work retrospectively which can hopefully go on to pave the way for useful feedback or ideas. Its what we like to think as the first step to openly sharing your research. Please feel free to submit your posters to us too; its completely free to deposit and view existing posters and should take no more than 10 minutes to do so.
Also, your half-joke is actually a reality. In the medical fields especially, there are complete digitized solutions that go from creating a poster in 10 minutes using state of the art software to presenting them at a conference on immaculate LCD screens! (ePostersLive - http://www.eposterslive.com/ if your interested in seeing it in action).
Michael Markie (Editor, F1000Posters)