Links from free moderated message boards - helpful?

[webwannabee]

I am in a scientific field of study; These are my colleagues' legit sites that have been up for 7+ years (also highly technical sites that have similar scientific content)

Will they boost me?

[tedster]

If you're talking about links within a post or an article that directly cite your pages, they can be some help, but usually not a lot. The key will be how well the free forum's pages are indexed and linked to.

Sounds like these links would be very natural and useful for your colleagues. No reason I can see not to have them there, even if the ranking help is not major. They would be one part of a healthy backlink profile.