Europlanet Science Congress 2020
Virtual meeting
21 September – 9 October 2020
Europlanet Science Congress 2020
Virtual meeting
21 September – 9 October 2020
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Poster presentation guidelines

Please note that the "private" poster presentations that may only be viewed by participants are marked with the following no sharing icon:

Poster presentations for EPSC 2020 should be submitted by 7 September 2020. Poster presentations for EPSC2020 must be formatted to enable comfortable on-screen viewing by participants. The 'traditional style' of a single large sheet of A0 is not appropriate and will not be accepted. Any authors uploading presentations in A0 format will be contacted by the conveners and asked to resubmit. We request that authors follow these guidelines:

  • Your poster presentation should be in English and cover the same material as your abstract.
  • Posters should be uploaded as PDF documents containing a maximum of six landscape slides (the equivalent of standard PowerPoint slides). For details of how to make an interactive poster, see the Tutorial.
  • For details of how to make an interactive poster, see the Tutorial (please note that while interactivity is encouraged, it is not a requirement in poster presentations).
  • The slides must be self-contained and are designed to be read, so a bit more text can be added than would be considered appropriate in an oral presentation.
  • You are free to organise your slides as you wish, but a potential structure is as follows:
    - Slide 1: Title/author details; abstract/overview of key results.
    - Slide 2: Introduction, and necessary background.
    - Slides 3-4: Methodology and results.
    - Slide 5: Discussion, conclusions
    - Slide 6: Acknowledgements/references.
  • Your title/name/affiliation/contact details should be clearly highlighted at the top of slide 1.
  • We encourage you to have your name and a slide number on each successive slide.
  • Text on slides should be clear and concise with correct spelling. Please use fonts that are clear to read (e.g. Arial, Calibri or Verdana), and ensure there is good colour contrast between the text and the background.
  • Prepare all diagrams or charts neatly and legibly beforehand, in a size sufficient to be read on screen, including annotations (see notes on accessibility below).
  • Links to web-based content are welcome.
  • Make good use of colour to highlight different features within the text and charts.
  • Bullet points and enumerated lists are easier to digest than large blocks of text.
  • Be aware that some users may have restricted bandwidth capabilities. Where possible, please downsample images in your poster to printable standard (150-300 dpi). In Adobe Acrobat, this can be achieved by "Save as Other > Optimised PDF", adjusting the pixel sampling accordingly. On a PC, PowerPoint offers size options when exporting to PDF. If you need to reduce the file size of PDF exports when using PowerPoint on a Mac, go to "PowerPoint>Preferences>General>Print Quality (Paper/PDF)" and adjust the desired quality to medium or low.
  • If you choose to make an interactive poster, please note that the Mac version of PowerPoint does not save hyperlinks when it exports a file as a PDF. To save an interactive poster from PowerPoint on a Mac, use an online converter tool (e.g. https://smallpdf.com/ppt-to-pdf) or upload your PowerPoint file to Google Drive, open it in Google Slides and download it as a PDF (you may need to check the formatting).
  • Each poster will have a dedicated forum for asynchronous discussion, so please monitor this regularly over the full duration of the conference. There will be no dedicated "author in attendance" time. Consider posting an initial "welcome" comment introducing your topic and inviting questions.
  • You should feel free to advertise your poster via the session-wide discussion board, and via social media. Indeed, the six slides can be posted as social-media images to promote discussion, using the hashtag #EPSC2020. Please note that the discussion forum will only be accessible to EPSC2020 registered participants.

Accessibility and readability

  • The minimum font size you should use is 16pt.
  • Use sans serif fonts such as Arial, Calibri, Verdana or Helvetica that are easier to read.
  • You should ensure that there is sufficient contrast between your text and the background and try to use colour schemes suitable for participants with colour vision deficiencies (e.g. red-green colour blindness). Use online tools to check e.g. at: https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ and https://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness-simulator/). Optimise your poster for screen readers by using the built-in title and sub-title fields in PowerPoint and Keynote to provide a navigable structure, and by adding alt-text descriptions to images. Try not to embed text within images, as a screen reader will not be able to pick this up.
  • Optimise your poster for screen readers by using the built-in title and sub-title fields in PowerPoint and Keynote to provide a navigable structure, and by adding alt-text descriptions to images. Try not to embed text within images, as a screen reader will not be able to pick this up.
  • PowerPoint offers an in-built accessibility checker tool (Tools>Check Accessibility), which can draw attention to accessibility issues in your presentation.

Public/Private settings for poster presentations

  • When you upload your poster presentation, you will be asked to mark it as "Public" or "Private". We encourage you to choose the open access "Public" option.
  • If your presentation contains material that you do not wish to be shared publicly, you can choose the "Private" option. In this case, your poster will only be accessible to registered EPSC2020 participants.
  • Note that commenting will be restricted to EPSC participants, via the dedicated discussion forums on the EPSC website.
  • Posters will be available via the Copernicus website for the duration of EPSC2020 and on the archived site for one year afterwards.