Figshare is an online
open access repository 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,
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 M ...
.
History
Figshare was launched in January 2011 by Mark Hahnel
and has been supported by
Digital Science 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
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* '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series
* '' Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic
* Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group
** Ph.D. (Ph.D. al ...
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 of ...
biology.
In January 2013, Figshare announced a partnership with
PLOS 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 to support the collection of
altmetrics.
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/lyric ...
, 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
altmetrics.
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 ...
, 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 mu ...
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.
See also
*
Dryad
A dryad (; el, Δρυάδες, ''sing''.: ) is a tree nymph or tree spirit in Greek mythology. ''Drys'' (δρῦς) signifies " oak" in Greek, and dryads were originally considered the nymphs of oak trees specifically, but the term has evolved t ...
*
Open Science Framework
*
Zenodo
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