At this year’s conference, we are providing the opportunity for members of the RSE community to present their work using posters. Posters allow presenters to present their work in an engaging way and to engage in discussions with conference attendees on a one-to-one basis.

Additionally, conference attendees will be able to vote for their favourite poster and there will be prizes for the best poster, as well as runner-up prizes.

Planning your Submission

When you submit your proposal, you will be required to provide the following information:

  • Title – Should describe what your poster is about. (max 50 words)
  • Abstract – A brief and attention-grabbing summary of the content of your poster. (max 250 words)
  • Expertise Level – what level of expertise will your poster be aimed at?
  • Audience – describe how your submission is of interest to the RSE community and your specific target audience.

An example of a well structured abstract is included at the bottom of this page.

Note that this conference is a hybrid event and posters will be published online for remote participants to view and remote participants will be able to attend the poster lightning talks remotely. It is expected that posters and lightning talks should provide an equivalent experience for online and in-person participants (guidance will be provided for accepted submissions). We may not be able to broadcast video of the speakers from all rooms and may be limited to audio and the projected screen (i.e. slides or other software presented).

Publication

The title and abstract will be published on the conference website as soon as your proposal has been accepted and will be used as part of the advertisement for the poster session.

Poster Guidelines

We want to make sure that all posters are as engaging and accessible as possible. If your proposal is accepted, please consider the following guidelines when designing your poster.

Format

Posters should be:

  • A0 sized (841 x 1188 mm)
  • Portrait orientation preferred

Audience and Outcomes

You should also consider the following:

  • Your Target Audience 
    • Would your audience require any prerequisite knowledge to understand your poster? 
    • What information could you include to make your poster accessible to as wide an audience as possible?
  • Core Message
    • What is the core message of your poster? 
  • Learning Outcomes 
    • What do you expect your audience to gain/learn from viewing your poster?

Readability Tips

  • Please use an accessible, easily readable font
    (e.g. Tahoma, Calibri, Helvetica, Arial, Verdana)
  • For legible text, we recommend: 
    • 24pt+ for text
    • 48pt+ for titles
  • Use an accessible colour palette that makes your content clear and easy to read for everyone. (search for “accessible colour palettes”)
  • We also have detailed accessibility guidelines

At the Conference

Posters will be displayed in a designated area, which will be open to all attendees for the duration of the conference. Successful applicants will be asked to meet the Poster Chair in the designated space on the morning of Day 1 of the Conference to set up the posters.

  • You will need to print your poster and bring it to the conference venue. 
  • We will provide boards, hanging materials etc.

Poster Events

Additionally, the following events will take place:

Lightning Talks

Lightning Talks will take place during one of the plenary sessions. Each presenter will present a brief, two (2) minute summary of the content of their poster to conference attendees. You do not need to prepare slides for the lightning talks.

Poster Session

There will be a dedicated Poster Session, where each presenter will be expected to be beside their posters for the duration of the session to answer questions and discuss the content of the poster. This session is expected to last for approximately one (1) hour.

Judging and Prizes

Posters will be judged based on the following criteria, and prizes will be awarded to the poster with the highest score:

  • Use of artwork/images/graphs/visualisations
  • Logical flow and layout
  • Clarity, readability and accessibility
  • Public Vote – all conference attendees will be allowed to vote for their favourite poster, which will contribute towards the final score.

Wider dissemination after the conference and licencing

Posters will be published on the conference website and made available before, during, and after the conference. Recordings of lightning talks will be shared via YouTube. All material will be shared under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence unless an alternative open licence is agreed in advance with the conference committee. Posters, recordings, subtitles, slides, and any additional Q&A will also be made available via Zenodo.

Example abstract

Below is an example abstract from RSE conf 2022 submitted by The Carpentries to give you an idea of how to structure your submission.

“The Carpentries teaches software and data skills to researchers and librarians all over the world. Our Instructor Training program promotes good teaching practices, grounded in research findings in educational psychology. Certified Instructors teach lessons developed and maintained by the community in short-format workshops. These lessons are developed in open source repositories and published online with a permissive CC-BY license.

The Carpentries Incubator was created to provide a space for the community to collaborate on the development and testing of new lessons. The Incubator contains more than 100 lesson repositories, at various different stages of the lesson life cycle, teaching a wide range of skills relevant to RSEs, including workflow management, statistics and deep learning, and MRI data analysis. Community members collaborate to create new lessons, and teach and provide feedback on those that have reached later stages of maturity.

The Carpentries Lab provides a space for the community to perform open peer review of these lessons, curating a collection of accessible, high-quality community-developed lessons that Instructors can be confident are ready to adopt and teach to their audience. In collaboration with The Journal of Open Source Education (JOSE), the Lab provides a mechanism for peer review to result in journal publication credit for lesson developers.

This poster will outline the pathways a lesson can take through The Carpentries Incubator and Lab, the support provided for lesson development in The Carpentries, and details of the open peer review and publication process.”

The actual poster for this abstract is available at  https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7114498.