Part 13: What’s Next?

You have presented your poster to much fanfair. That doesn’t mean your poster’s life is over. In fact, many posters get a second life. Many labs, departments, and centers will hang posters on the wall. Some of them may even frame them, depending on the budget available. Speak with your PI or administration about acquiring wall space and assistance with hanging your poster. Now that your poster is a beautiful piece of scientific art, it’ll look great in a public space, and you’ll be sure to get lots of compliments from your colleagues!

Your poster can also have a digital life. There are many platforms available that will store host your poster. Our favorites are slideshare.net and figshare. Both sites will host your poster for free, track views and visitors, enable downloading, and allow you to embed the poster in other web sites (perfect for your lab page, or your online CV). To upload to either site, you’ll want to have a PDF version of your poster.

Slideshare is more like the Youtube of presentations, and will give your poster a much wider audience. This is a great option for those of you who wish to communicate with audiences not present at your conference. You can see the Open Notebook Science poster we’ve used so much as an example on slideshare.

figshare on the other hand is designed for an academic audience. The platform gives you the added benefit of making your poster citable and will provide a DOI. Here is the citation for the ONS poster via figshare:

Salvagno, Anthony (2012): Open Notebook Science – SACNAS Poster. figshare.

http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.96326

Retrieved 18:17, Jul 02, 2015 (GMT)

By default your poster will be given a CC-BY license, which allows others to share your research provided they give proper attribution. figshare is set up for archival purposes, so you can be assured that your poster will exist, digitally, for as long as you want it to.

If you upload your poster online, you can also point your poster visitors to its online location. This would give you a great reason to give them your business card (with the poster’s online location), and give your visitors a more-than-lasting impression.

The End

Well, you have now reached the end of this guide - thanks for reading through it! What now? Well, we have other guides for you (here) that you might want to poke around. Let us also humbly remind you that you should consider taking one of our online communication classes. We offer them several times a year and, by signing up for our mailing list, you can be the first in your neighborhood to be notified about what's coming up. Our classes are extremely collaborative - which is a really essential part of the process of working through this stuff. It is not so easy to come up with the answers all on your own.

Also, give us a buzz if you have any questions on anything! We're always happy to chat about this stuff.