The State of Scientific Poster Sharing and Reuse

TL;DR

This paper examines the sharing, reuse, and FAIR compliance of scientific posters across multiple platforms, highlighting current practices and proposing guidelines to enhance their accessibility and reuse.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of poster sharing platforms, identifies gaps in metadata and persistent identifiers, and offers recommendations to improve FAIR compliance.

Findings

150,000 posters shared across 43 platforms as of 2024

Many platforms lack persistent identifiers for posters

Researchers often do not provide structured metadata for discovery

Abstract

Scientific posters are one of the most common forms of scholarly communication and contain early-stage insights with potential to accelerate scientific discovery. We investigated where posters are shared, to what extent their sharing aligns with the FAIR principles, and how commonly they are reused. We identified 86 platforms hosting posters, with many not assigning persistent identifiers. A total of 150k posters are shared as of 2024 on the 43 platforms where we were able to count, which is relatively low. Looking in more detail at posters shared on Zenodo and Figshare, we found that repositories are not always supporting structured metadata critical for poster discovery, like conference information, and that researchers are not providing such metadata even if they are supported. We also observed that while there is some engagement with posters in terms of views and downloads, citing posters is not yet a common practice. Our recommendations are for the scientific community to encourage poster sharing and reuse and establish clear guidelines to make posters FAIR.