BNA2025 poster abstract submission guidelines

We're delighted that you are submitting an abstract to present a poster at the International BNA2025 Festival of Neuroscience.

Please carefully read the guidance on this page before preparing and submitting your poster abstract. Abstracts that do not meet the requirements will not be accepted.

Submission deadline: Midnight on 31st January 2025*

*Please note that this is the one and only deadline. There will not be an extension, and there will not be a late-breaking abstracts call.

General information

Only registered delegates can submit an abstract. If you have not registered yet, please register here. Once you have registered you will be sent a link to access the abstract submission portal.
Abstracts must describe:
- an empirical piece of research (or, for preregistration posters, plans for empirical research; or
- a theoretical piece of research, where the subject of the poster is modelling/simulation and is based on empirical data (or, for preregistration posters, plans for such research).
All accepted abstracts, will be published in the Gold open access journal, Brain and Neuroscience Advances.

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Poster fees

Please note that there is no fee for submitting a poster.
However if accepted after review, each abstract will incur a handling fee of £65.00 (inclusive of VAT). This will be charged upon successful review and inclusion to the timetable. If the fee has not been paid by the specified date, then the poster will be withdrawn from the Festival.

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Credibility in Neuroscience

The BNA is committed to encouraging neuroscientists to make their research as robust, reliable, replicable, and reproducible as possible to boost Credibility in Neuroscience, and we are encouraging abstract presenters to demonstrate ways that they have made their work more credible – for example, ensuring information on sample sizes and blinding is included, or for in vivo research highlighting use of the ARRIVE guidelines for reporting experiments (see our in vivo toolkit).

For our traditional posters, we strongly encourage you to demonstrate efforts to boost credibility through adding up to three Open Science Badges to your abstract. Open Science Badges are part of an initiative from the Center for Open Science, awarded to researchers who openly share data, code, materials or preregister their work. By providing a relevant URL to evidence where these are openly available, you can receive a preregistered, open data, or open materials badge. For more information on Open Science Badges, visit https://bnacredibility.org.uk/open-science-badges

Poster themes

You will be asked to categorise your poster into one of the following themes during the submission process. This complements our scientific programme of symposia, workshops and plenary sessions, and ensures the diversity of neuroscience research is represented as far as possible.

Aging and Neurodegeneration
Behavioural neuroscience
Brain repair and regeneration
Brain/Body interactions
Computational and theoretical neuroscience
Human cognitive neuroscience
Neurodevelopment, stem cells and associated disorders
Neurons & Glia: physiology, cell-cell communication and plasticity
Neuropharmacology
Neurotechnology & AI
Novel methods and technology development
Other (history of neuroscience, PPIE etc)
Other neurological and genetic disorders
Psychiatry & Mental Health
Training & Education
Treatments & Translational Neuroscience

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'Traditional' or Preregistration poster abstracts - key differences

You will be given the choice to select 'Traditional' or 'Preregistration' when submitting your abstract. The key differences between these two types of poster are as follows:

Traditional poster abstract	Preregistration poster abstract
Describes work that has already been completed.	Describes plans for work that has yet to be carried out.
Includes results/data and conclusions.	Does NOT include results/data or conclusions
Describes the statistical approach that was used for assessing data	Describes the statistical approach that will be used to assess data

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Abstract submission portal

Once you have registered you will be sent a link to access the online poster abstract submission portal, submissions will be collected via Oxford Abstracts.

Complete the required fields in the form (see below).

Poster type:

Please select whether you are submitting a traditional or pregistration poster abstract.

Poster title:

You can use up to 150 characters including spaces.

Author details:

Author details must be entered as you wish them to appear in the abstract book.
The first author is also the primary contact and the presenting author.
The first author must be registered for the meeting and present in their allocated poster session.

Abstract content:

Enter your abstract text in the text box.
We recommend that you write your abstract in Word, and then copy and paste in to the abstract submission form.
Make check to make sure that any symbols (µ, β etc) have been entered and displayed correctly.

For traditional posters, your abstract must include sections for:
1. Introduction
2. Methods
3. Approach for statistical analysis (e.g. ANOVA, confidence intervals, t-test etc)
4. Results and conclusions
If your traditional abstract does not include cover all four of these points, including your approach for statistical analysis (or a clear explanation for why it is impossible or inappropriate to include this) your abstract will not be accepted.

For preregistration posters, your abstract must include sections for:
1. Introduction
2. Methods
3. Approach for statistical analysis (e.g. ANOVA, confidence intervals, t-test etc)
If your preregistration abstract does not include cover all three of these points, including your approach for statistical analysis (or a clear explanation for why it is impossible or inappropriate to include this) your abstract will not be accepted.

You can upload one image/figure. Images should be standard image format of jpg, pict, tiff, etc (not a PowerPoint slide, Word document, pdf or similar). Files must have resolution of 300 DPI or more. Please make sure the legend is part of the image, and is at a suitable size to read when displayed at around 10 cm x 10cm. If you wish to include a graph or table, please upload this as an image format.

Poster Prizes:
This is open to PhD students and early career scientists (up to five years since graduating from highest qualification level; permanent faculty members are not eligible). Only presenting authors are eligible (presenting at the poster session, and first author on the abstract). Please tick the box if you meet the eligibility criteria and wish to be considered for a poster prize.

Rapid-fire oral presentations:
You have the option to put forward your abstract to the Programme Committee for a short oral presentation. These are scheduled to take place in a rapid-fire session during the Festival, giving you the chance to raise awareness of your research and invite people to visit your poster. Poster talks are 3 MINUTES long.

If your abstract is selected for oral presentation, the presenting author will be permitted a maximum of one oral presentation in the program. Any authors selected to give an oral presentation will also give a poster presentation as well.

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Statements

During the poster abstract submission process you will be asked to comply with the following:

Declaration statement
Ethical standards statement
Conflict of Interest and Disclosure Statement

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Selection process

The Programme Committee will review all submitted abstracts. Notification regarding abstract acceptance and scheduling will be sent to the submitting author.

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The Festival of Neuroscience is run by BNA Events Ltd (Company number 07784689), a wholly owned subsidiary of the British Neuroscience Association (Company Number: 04307833, Registered Charity No: 1103852).