Archiving posters using figshare

Conference posters have traditionally been ephemera. There have been a few websites that have tried to become a repository for posters, but none have attracted much attention.

figshare might be different. I’ve used this service a few times, but not for posters... yet. But I expect many have already used it for posters.

M. Wilson Sayres at Panda’s Thumb has a nice article about using figshare for posters.

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.

If you have used figshare for posters, what has your experience been? How many views has it received? Has it led to any follow-ups from other interested scientists?

External links

FigShare: Increasing the impact of scientific posters