At conferences, people often present slides and/or posters. Ideally, these help interested researchers to find you and your work, so in the old days it was common to bring handouts of your poster or slides for audience members to take - or hand out business cards.

Nowadays, most scientific infrastructure is digital. For example, most professional conferences now use Open Science Framework (OSF) Meetings pages to collect slides and posters so they can be easily found by other researchers.

This creates an awesome opportunity to help people find your slides or poster, link them to related work, and/or make it easier for them to find other slides or powers from the same session.

OSF Meetings

OSF Meetings is a great resource for sharing conference materials. For a list of OSF meetings pages for Health Psychology conferences, please see https://hpss.one.

Once an OSF Meetings page for a conference has been created, it’s supereasy to add slides or posters:

Compose a new email from your OSF account address (no account yet? See the tip in the box below)
Address it to an address like “X-poster@osf.io” or “X-talk@osf.io”, where you replace X with the conference name in the OSF Meetings page URL (e.g. “EHPS2024”)
As the email subject, use the title of your poster or presentation
As the email body, include the abstract
As the attachment, include the PDF of the poster or slide deck
Hit send

Tip: OSF accounts and email

Multiple emails

OSF accounts support multiple emails. You can click your name in the top-right corner; then go to My Profile, and then visit the Account Settings. You can add Alternate emails there (and switch which one to use as primary email, which is where OSF will email you). You can send emails to OSF Meetings accounts from any of your primary or alternate emails.

Creating an account

If you don’t have an OSF account yet, you can also create one at https://osf.io/register before sending the email.

The Open Science Framework then creates a new repository with the file you sent. That file is then also displayed in the list at the OSF Meetings page.

Being ahead and in control of things

Now, the trick is: you can edit that repository like any other OSF repository! This is great, because you can do the following:

Use the “wiki” component to link people to other cool resourced: related publications, your Mastodon or other social media profike, your OpenAlex profile, a blog, etc.
Link to other OSF projects or components
If you’re in a symposium, create another repo for that symposium, and then link to each of the contributions’ repo’s

But most importantly: you can also update the file later (as long as you do it by uploading a new version of the file, so you won’t be able to change the filename any more).

This means you can do the following:

Create a first draft of your slides or poster
Give it a sensible filename (I always use author1--author2---year---title.pdf - I use dashes to separate the components because spaces are best avoided, see this excellent slide deck) - remember, you won’t be able to change it later!
Email it to the OSF Meetings page for your conference as explained above
Get the URL to the shiny new repo that OSF will create
Include that in your poster or slide deck, ideally with a QR code (see below)
When your poster or slide deck is done, update the file in the OSF repo, et voila!

You now have a super-easy way for people to find your slides or poster, plus all the other stuff you want to link them to, and your contribution is easy to find through the conference’s OSF Meetings page! 👌

And as a cherry on the cake, you can request a DOI for the repository! 🍒

That helps people to cite your poster or talk. And finally, the final touch: after about 24 hours, the DOI will have been ‘minted’ (as it’s called) by CrossRef. Once that’s done, you can then generate a ShortDOI for the DOI at https://shortdoi.org!

That means you have a better, shorter URL (e.g. https://doi.org/mh3s), which also makes for a better QR code (fewer, larger blocks, making it easier to scan from a distance)! 🤩

Creating QR Codes

There are several ways to create a QR code.

For quick and dirty situations, I use the Tab2QR (Firefox, Chrome) browser plugin to create a PNG file.

For more serious situations (e.g. slides or other more ‘high stakes’ situations where I want more control, I use the awesome InkScape. There is a great explanation of how to create a QR code with InkScape here: https://daviesmediadesign.com/how-to-generate-qr-codes-in-inkscape/.

One advantage of using InkScape is that you get an SVG file, which you can scale up as much as you want without it ever becoming ugly (as you get when enlarging low-resolution images).

A second advantage is that you can set the ‘error correction’; with low error correction, you get a simpler QR code (fewer, larger blocks, making it easier to scan from a distance); but with higher error correction levels, the QR code contains redundancies so it can still be reconstructed if part of it is obstructed when it’s scanned.

And that allows you to insert, for example, a logo in the QR code 🤩

There also exist various websites where you can create QR Codes; you can use search engines to find those. I have no recommendations as I never use them myself 😬

A pro tip for pros

Finally, if you’re in a symposium, there’s one last step to really round things off. Before submitting the symposium abstract, you can create an OSF repository for the symposium. You will later link to the separate contributions’ repositories as explained above.

You can then create a DOI for the symposium repo, and then a ShortDOI. And you can then include that in the abstract. This way everybody with the abstract book can easily find your contributions!