This file hosts some thoughts about how presentations could be made more useful when shared. It is meant to complement Ten Simple Rules for Making Good Oral Presentations and Ten Simple Rules for a Good Poster Presentation by focusing on the presentation materials and how to share them.
- Presentations are most effective in sharing when the underlying materials (e.g. slides) are available to people in the audience when the talk is actually given. This way, they can browse the materials at their own pace, take more specific notes and ask more informed questions.
- See the two Ten Simple Rules papers mentioned above
- use identifiers for things that have them (e.g. referenced papers or protein structures), and link them
- link acronyms or explain them somewhere, e.g. on an "extra slide"
- Ideally, it should facilitate presentation across platforms, it should be friendly to users and reusers (which may include machines), and it should be simple to generate, render and archive.
- Similar considerations apply to components of the presentation, e.g. images should be shared as vector graphics whenever possible rather than as bitmaps.
- There should be a clear license statement either within a presentation (e.g. on one slide) or closely associated with it (e.g. in the metadata).
- I am not aware of any good guidance on how to do good live demos of research-related software and tools, so this could be another avenue worth exploring.