Figshare is an online

open access repository An open repository or open-access repository is a digital platform that holds research output and provides free, immediate and permanent access to research results for anyone to use, download and distribute. To facilitate open access such repositori ...

where researchers can preserve and share their research outputs, including figures, datasets, images, and videos. It is free to upload content and free to access, in adherence to the principle of

open data Open data is data that is openly accessible, exploitable, editable and shared by anyone for any purpose. Open data is licensed under an open license. The goals of the open data movement are similar to those of other "open(-source)" movements ...

. Figshare is one of a number of portfolio businesses supported by

Digital Science Digital Science (or Digital Science & Research Solutions Ltd) is a technology company with its headquarters in London, United Kingdom. The company focuses on strategic investments into startup companies that support the research lifecycle. Histo ...

, a subsidiary of

Springer Nature Springer Nature or the Springer Nature Group is a German-British academic publishing company created by the May 2015 merger of Springer Science+Business Media and Holtzbrinck Publishing Group's Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan, and Macm ...

History

Figshare was launched in January 2011 by Mark Hahnel and has been supported by

since a January 2012 relaunch. Hahnel first developed the platform as a personal custom solution for the organization and publication of diverse research products generated in support of his PhD in

stem cell In multicellular organisms, stem cells are undifferentiated or partially differentiated cells that can differentiate into various types of cells and proliferate indefinitely to produce more of the same stem cell. They are the earliest type o ...

biology. In January 2013, Figshare announced a partnership with

PLOS PLOS (for Public Library of Science; PLoS until 2012 ) is a nonprofit publisher of open-access journals in science, technology, and medicine and other scientific literature, under an open-content license. It was founded in 2000 and launc ...

to integrate Figshare data hosting, access, and visualization with their associated PLOS articles. In September 2013, the service launched a hosted

institutional repository An institutional repository is an archive for collecting, preserving, and disseminating digital copies of the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution. Academics also utilize their IRs for archiving published work ...

service. In December 2013, they announced integration with

ImpactStory OurResearch, formerly known as ImpactStory, is a nonprofit organization which creates and distributes tools and services for libraries, institutions and researchers. The organization follows open practices with their data (to the extent allowed by ...

to support the collection of

altmetrics In scholarly and scientific publishing, altmetrics are non-traditional bibliometrics proposed as an alternative or complement to more traditional citation impact metrics, such as impact factor and ''h''-index. The term altmetrics was proposed in ...

. Figshare also hosts the Reproducibility Collection as a founding member of The Reproducibility Initiative, which acts as an independent and blinded validator for replication of submitted data. Figshare releases ' The State of Open Data' each year to assess the changing academic landscape around open research.

Concept

Researchers can upload all of their research outputs to Figshare, thus making them publicly available. Users can upload files in any format, and items are attributed a DOI. The current 'types' that can be chosen are figures, datasets, media (including video), papers (including pre-prints), posters, code, and filesets (groups of files). All files are released under a

Creative Commons license A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work".A "work" is any creative material made by a person. A painting, a graphic, a book, a song/lyrics ...

, CC-BY for most files and CC0 (public domain) for datasets. Figshare allows researchers to publish negative data. The withholding of negative publications is a widely known phenomenon that leads to a significant bias, often referred to as the file drawer effect. By encouraging publishing of figures, charts, and data, rather than being limited to the traditional entire 'paper', knowledge can be shared more quickly and effectively. Figshare also tracks the download statistics for hosted materials, acting in turn as a source for

. The main hosting mechanism for the platform is

Amazon S3 Amazon S3 or Amazon Simple Storage Service is a service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that provides object storage through a web service interface. Amazon S3 uses the same scalable storage infrastructure that Amazon.com uses to run its e- ...

, with CLOCKSS serving as an additional host for public content. Both of these resources support backup and preservation via a distributed

cloud computing Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over mul ...

network.

Integration with other platforms

Figshare features integration with

ORCID The ORCID (; Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is a nonproprietary alphanumeric code to uniquely identify authors and contributors of scholarly communication as well as ORCID's website and services to look up authors and their bibliographic ...

, Symplectic Elements, can import items from GitHub, and is a source tracked by Altmetric.com.

References

External links

*
List of organisations, universities and other entities using Figshare
{{commons category-inline, Figshare Creative Commons-licensed works Open-access archives Open science Open data Academic publishing Data publishing Scholarly communication Institutional repository software

History

Concept

Integration with other platforms

See also

References

External links