Introducing Posters.science: A New Platform to Maximize the Impact of Scientific Posters

We are developing posters.science through a new grant from The Navigation Fund.

✨ Why Posters Matter

Every year, millions of scientific posters are presented at conferences around the world. They often mark the first public disclosure of new research ideas and results, from novel methods and fresh datasets to early hypotheses and unpublished findings. Posters spark hallway conversations and surface insights well before papers are published.

🗑️ Vanishing Knowledge

Despite their value, most posters quietly vanish into trash cans or hard drives after the conference ends (Table 1). They’re rarely preserved, indexed, or cited. Some researchers share their posters on platforms like Zenodo, Figshare, and F1000Research. But after conducting an in-depth investigation (work in progress - results will be presented in an upcoming paper), we found fewer than 100k posters online. That’s a tiny fraction compared to the tens of millions likely presented over the past decade. Even when shared, essential metadata like conference name or keywords are missing, making posters difficult to find and reuse by the intended audience.

Table 1. Key metrics about posters

Metric	Sources
Millions of scientific posters are presented annually	The “wall of text” visual structure of academic conference posters
Fewer than 100k posters are currently findable online	Our upcoming paper Zenodo Figshare F1000Research
Less than 22% of posters are published as papers (some resources show even below 3%)	The poster to publication puzzle High nonpublication rate from publication professionals hinders evidence-based publication practices
It takes around 2 years from the poster presentation to the publication of the related paper	The poster to publication puzzle

🚀 Enters Posters.science

That’s where posters.science comes in. We’re building a free and open-source platform that lets researchers easily share and discover posters that are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR). The platform will streamline sharing to trusted repositories like Zenodo and Figshare, while using AI-powered tools to automatically extract rich metadata and generate a machine-friendly version of each poster (what we are calling poster.json) to minimize effort of the researchers.

But we’re not stopping at here. Posters.science will also include smart-search capabilities to help researchers find posters and make discoveries by directly asking complex, meaningful questions like: “What new discoveries were presented at ARVO 2025 regarding the connection between the eye and Alzheimer’s disease?”. We will register not only posters shared through posters.science in our database but also all openly available posters on the net to create the largest registry of posters.

By facilitating the preservation, indexing, and reuse of posters, we aim to unlock their untapped potential and turn these once-temporary artifacts into enduring research assets.

📅 Coming Summer 2026

We’re just getting started on building posters.science. Over the next 10 months, we’ll be designing and developing the platform, building and validating our metadata extraction and smart search tools, and working closely with researchers to conduct beta testing. Our goal is to release a public version by Summer 2026.

Want to stay in the loop? Visit posters.science and leave your email to get notified when we launch!

📢 Disclosures

The development of posters.science is supported by a grant from The Navigation Fund (additional details about the grant can be found in the DataCite Commons grant record). This post was written with help from ChatGPT.