We’re big fans of Open Access Week here at Figshare. It’s an opportunity to showcase all the great work done to advocate open scholarly outputs and a chance to encourage others to consider an as-open-as-possible, as-closed-as-necessary approach to managing their data.
To celebrate, we'll be running an upload competition from 22-28 October 2018 to encourage researchers to upload their research outputs as openly as possible. Anyone who uploads to Figshare between these dates (as they occur in British Summer Time) will be entered into a chance to win one of three £100 prizes to further your research and some Figshare swag. Participants will also have an Open Access Week badge added to their Figshare profile page.A number of Figshare for Institutions organizations are also participating in an upload competition from 22-28 October 2018. Institutions participating are:
University of Adelaide: contact andrew.williams@adelaide.edu.au for more information.University of Amsterdam and Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences: contact rdm-support@uva.nl for more information.Brunel University: contact researchdata@brunel.ac.uk for more information.Carnegie Mellon University (KiltHub): contact kbehrman@andrew.cmu.edu or daschere@andrew.cmu.edu for more information.Cape Peninsula University of Technology: contact tshetshaV@cput.ac.za for more information.University of Cape Town: contact the Digital Library Services for more information.
Cary Institute: contact schulera@caryinstitute.org for more information
HHMI Janelia Research Campus: contact fieldingj@hhmi.org for more information.Loughborough University: contact rdm@lboro.ac.uk for more information.The Open University: contact dan.crane@open.ac.uk for more information.We’ll be announcing both individual and institutional winners the week commencing 29 October.
If you have any questions about the competition, please contact megan@figshare.com. Happy uploading!
So far in our ‘Figshare as a . . .’ series we have looked at Figshare as a data repository. This second blog of the series looks at Figshare as a thesis repository.
Sign up to our webinar Figshare as a thesis repository 26th of September, 17:00 (UK time)
Monash University provides an interesting use of monash.figshare to showcase its theses.
Monash University Library had an institutional repository and chose Figshare as one of the platforms to migrate content into from their soon to be decommissioned Research Repository. Monash was interested in moving towards a self-submission workflow to unchain it from a library-driven workflow.
One of the reasons Monash chose Figshare was that the review workflow was attractive to theses submissions. From January 2017 the Figshare API was used to load theses into monash.figshare including embargoed and confidential material as a way of making them more accessible.
Monash Library was looking to adopt Figshare at the same time that Monash Graduate Education (which centrally administers the theses programs) was also upgrading it's examination process to automate it, remove the manual transfer of paper theses for examination and generally streamline the process.
Monash Graduate Education built an examination management system that takes the thesis manuscript for examination at submission, stores it in the cloud and organises the examination stages. It then delivers the manuscript to the nominated examiners, and processes their comments. From the dashboard once the head of examinations has awarded a degree the thesis is published into monash.figshare without any intervention from the Library.
This new process has reduced the thesis examination process from six months to six weeks.
Another option for theses is self-submission via Figshare’s submit function. This process is useful when candidates don’t have a Figshare for Institutions account as it allows them to upload and describe their work without having to create an account. In this instance they would go to their institution’s submit page, for example, institution.figshare.com/submit. From there they would be able to upload their work, describe it and submit it for publication but without having to create an account. Then an institutional administrator is able to review the data and metadata prior to publication, and is similar to the process of uploading to ChemRxiv. Using this method different subgroups could be set up each with its own custom metadata fields based on academic discipline, faculty hierarchy or in whatever way best suits the institution.
This simple workflow has 3 easy steps
If you’re interested in hearing whether Figshare would be a good fit at your institution, please get in touch with us at support@figshare.com or via twitter, facebook or google+.
When we started Figshare, a lot of people looked at the state of existing academic research dissemination and asked “Why bother?” The academic paper is a great format for conveying results, ideas and methods, so why do we need to make all of these other academic research outputs available too?
By Mark Hahnel, CEO and Founder of Figshare
The question reminds me of a quote often attributed to Henry Ford:
‘If you would have asked the people what they want, they would have asked for faster horses’.
The internet has brought speed to dissemination of papers, faster publication times, instant access etc which is fantastic, clearly. What we were looking at supporting, was the next paradigm in academic research; the ability to really build on top of the research that has gone before, without barriers. The ability to move further, faster.
I always used to suggest that the future of research could involve questions like: “Hey internet, give me every murine genome sequence that includes the coding sequence for genes X, Y and Z”, and then the data can be aggregated, queried and probed using analysis tools, either domain specific tools or generalist tools like plot.ly or tableau. For this to be possible, several steps needed to take place.
In the beginning, we focussed on step 1, encouraging academics to make their research open with a base layer of metadata. Critics suggest this metadata can never be marked up in a way to make the research truly reusable or useful. I’d counter that with the suggestion that, although this may be true for some research, the vast majority would not have been made available otherwise and there are ways to mark up content post publication. Using the example above about genome sequences, machines can query datasets to see which genes are coded for in a .fasta file, inferring more information and metadata than was captured at point of the files being published.
We now work to provide research infrastructure for funders, institutions and publishers to curate the content that their researchers are making available. This includes making sure ethic statements associated with the research are abided to, improving descriptive metadata and in the case of Springer Nature’s new service, checking for human identifiable information and marking up the content to make it as re-usable as possible.
This takes us on to point 2. Almost as monumental as funders mandating that all data, code and outputs from the research they fund be made openly available, is the global adoption of the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). Whilst, interpretation may differ, the core principles of open APIs, interoperable metadata standards and persistent identifiers helps all stakeholders move towards standard access to research data for both humans and machines. It is one of our core goals at Figshare to make sure that all of the infrastructure we provide to clients supports the FAIR principles and funder compliance.
The files need to be indexed in a consistent manner – this is why the google dataset search news is huge. Almost 100% of search traffic to Figshare infrastructure comes from Google. By providing a consistent search, we are in the first stages of allowing anyone anywhere to ask any question of the sum of the world’s academic data. Where above, I proposed the question ‘Hey internet’, what most people really ask is ‘Hey Google’. This not only brings widespread access and adoption, it also allows cross-repository queries. A query that on Figshare may bring you information about eg. Asthma rates in certain regions, can also be combined with governmental open data on socio-economic statuses of said area. This cross domain query can allow machine learning to look for correlations in datasets that may provide more focussed targets for researchers looking at causation. Of course, the tools to be built on top of such infrastructure require open APIs, something that Google Scholar has been hamstrung by in the past. This is due to academic paper dissemination models being built on pre-internet businesses. For the most part, open research data has been made possible due to the internet. This means that the next stage of academic research on top of the work that has gone before should and can happen in an unrestricted way. The Google team reference this themselves;
“This launch is one of a series of initiatives to bring datasets more prominently into our products. We recently made it easier to discover tabular data in Search, which uses this same metadata along with the linked tabular data to provide answers to queries directly in search results. While that initiative focused more on news organizations and data journalists, Dataset search can be useful to a much broader audience, whether you're looking for scientific data, government data, or data provided by news organizations.”
This ultimately means that anyone with a web connection will be able to ask any questions of the latest academic knowledge. We see tools like Google Dataset search as important next steps in pushing the envelope and for this reason, we welcome the progress.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on these ideas and anything described above. If you are interested in hearing whether these ideas would be a good fit at your institution, please get in touch at info@figshare.com or via twitter, facebook or google+.
We're proud to announce our new partnership with Sage Publishing, Advance, a social sciences preprints service.
We're proud to announce our new partnership with Sage Publishing, Advance, a social sciences preprints service. Advance: a SAGE preprints community will provide academic researchers with a global platform to share early versions of their work ahead of formal peer review and publication. The open access platform will support original research and reviews, making content open to receiving feedback from colleagues and peers. The service enables researchers to disseminate and start communicating about their time-sensitive work and ideas faster and to garner engagement and feedback throughout their research process. All preprints published on Advance are eligible for publication in a wide range of SAGE’s portfolio of peer-reviewed journals.Commenting on the new platform, Bob Howard, Senior Vice President of Global Journals, SAGE Publishing, remarked:
“Publishing and the dissemination of research is changing; transparency is key. Within the social sciences, moving to facilitate broad dissemination of ideas earlier in the research process will help to support wider engagement with these influential areas of research.
Since SAGE’s foundation our mission as a publisher has been to support an engaged society, playing a creative role in both the dissemination, access and creation of research on a global scale. Offering a preprints platform is a natural next step for SAGE.
Advance will provide a central place to share and build recognition for research discoveries — positively shaping the routes of future cutting edge research.”Advance provides an intuitive interface for authors to submit their research and once accepted, a preprint will be available online quickly – usually between 48-72 hours. The site features a monitored commenting feature giving authors the ability to receive feedback on their work (including sharing and embedding tools for soliciting feedback) – allowing them to further shape and improve their research. Authors can also track citations, Altmetrics, views, and downloads of their preprints. While submitting to Advance, researchers have the additional option of simultaneously submitting their work for acceptance to one of SAGE’s journals within the humanities and social sciences. Furthermore, all accepted preprints will be assigned a DOI, ensuring each preprint can be linked to its final published version in the future, helping to increase a final paper’s discoverability.
Speaking about the partnership, Howard further commented:“When looking for a partner, Figshare were once again a natural fit for SAGE. With their expertise, high quality technology and their commitment to open data, Figshare aligns closely with SAGE’s goal of supporting the global sharing and dissemination of research. This partnership enables us to capitalise on their software and expertise and ensure that we provide a high quality experience meeting researcher needs. “
Mark Hahnel, CEO and Founder of Figshare, added: “We’re excited to be working with SAGE in this expanded way. We have seen the value that preprints bring to the research community and process, and look forward to working with SAGE to enhance their offerings to the social science community.”
This new portal is live now at https://advance.sagepub.com/. Please get in touch if you are interested in learning more about Figshare for publishers: publishers.figshare.com.
We are excited to announce our first of many integrations with Dimensions, part of the Digital Science portfolio of products. As of today you can now view any open data hosted on Figshare, which is associated with a publication, directly within the Dimensions platform.
The integration allows for a more seamless experience for the Dimensions user by displaying associated data directly on the article details page using the Figshare Viewer, without the need to download any files. The technology, which is unique to Figshare, can preview over 1,200 different file types including data, videos, code, images and many other files that are commonly used in research.
Dimensions, which launched in January 2018, is a modern, innovative, linked research knowledge system that re-imagines discovery and access to research. Developed by Digital Science in collaboration with over 100 leading research organizations around the world, Dimensions brings together grants, publications, citations, alternative metrics, clinical trials and patents to deliver a platform that enables users to find and access the most relevant information faster, analyze the academic and broader outcomes of research, and gather insights to inform future strategy.
Every item on Figshare gets a unique DOI which is tracked by Altmetric for mentions across social media, news sites, blogs and grey literature. In addition to the data, downloads, views and citations of over 3 million files will now be available directly within the Dimensions platform to showcase the impact of supplemental data. All data will be openly available for academic reuse and licensed under a CC0, CC-BY and in some cases CC-BY-NC license. The integration is currently limited to publishers with Figshare for Publishers which includes Springer Nature, Sage, Wiley, Taylor and Francis, PLOS and Royal Society among many others. This is the first of many integrations between Figshare and Dimensions that will enrich the user experience on both platforms. To explore the new feature, visit https://app.dimensions.ai. If you have any feedback on this integration or would like to suggest other products for us to partner with please get in touch with us at support@figshare.com or via twitter,facebook or google+.
We're delighted to announce three new UK institutions, part of the Jisc shared services initiative, have selected Figshare as their choice for data repository.
The Jisc research data shared service is an initiative that offers participating institutions the opportunity to sustainably publish, discover, store, archive, preserve, and access research data. Pilot institutions are working with Jisc to develop the features of the research data shared service, while they receive support in choosing the repository and preservation systems, tendering and procurement.
More information on the shared service can be found here: https://www.jisc.ac.uk/rd/projects/research-data-shared-service. The institutions included in this deal are:
Middlesex UniversitySt George’s, University of LondonConsortium for Research Excellence, Support and Training (CREST)
Key aspects of the Figshare for Institutions platform includes:
John Kaye, Head of Change – Research at Jisc, said:“Figshare plays a vital role in the success of the Jisc Research Data Shared Service project. Figshare’s digital repository solution allows our members and their researchers to easily deposit and securely share research outputs. Figshare also brings expertise in research data management and the provision of cloud services, along with an openness to collaborate on the development of new features and functions with Jisc and our members.”
Vimal Shah, Research Information Manager at Middlesex University, said:“Piloting the data repository has enabled us to meet many of our researchers' data management requirements. During the implementation and trial period we have benefited from the dedicated support of the Figshare team together with the collective expertise and shared experience between Jisc and the RDSS pilot participants.”
Michelle Harricharan, Research Data Support Manager at St George’s, University of London, said:“This service will allow our academic community at St George’s to publish, store and preserve our research data seamlessly. It will open up the wealth of expert knowledge that we create to international academic and health professional communities and support the advancement of health, medicine and science.”
Rachel Persad, Policy Manager (Research & Innovation) at GuildHE, and manager of the Consortium for Research Excellence Support and Training (CREST) research network for smaller and specialist universities said:“Being involved in the JISC Shared Service Pilot is enabling smaller and specialist institutions to engage with the rapidly changing need and demand for open research data. Figshare provides our members with an elegant, robust, and adaptive tool with which to explore how to manage research data in the context of a smaller, less research intensive, environment, that may at the same time be dealing with complex and varied data types due to the specialist nature of their research. Having access to a responsive support team with a wealth of skills and knowledge in handling these issues is invaluable to small teams who need to use what resources they have effectively.”
Mark Hahnel, Founder of Figshare said:“It’s great to see more UK institutions adopt Figshare. With growing funder mandates and interest in making research data out.”
The pioneering platform is already established at institutions across the U.K., Europe, Australasia, Africa, and the USA, supporting needs for better storage, preservation, accessibility and publication of the outputs produced by their researchers.
Jisc (https://www.jisc.ac.uk/) is the UK’s expert member organisation for digital technology and digital resources in higher education, further education, skills and research. Our vision is to make the UK the most digitally advanced education and research nation in the world. We play a pivotal role in the development, adoption and use of technology by UK universities and colleges. We support the use of technology to improve learning, teaching, the student experience and institutional efficiency, as well as more powerful research. At the heart of Jisc’s support is Janet – the UK’s world-class National Research and Education Network (NREN). Owned, managed and operated by Jisc, Janet comprises a secure, state-of-the-art network infrastructure spanning all four nations of the UK.
Jisc Press office: Press@jisc.ac.uk
0203 006 6056
Twitter: @Jisc
This is the first of our Figshare as a . . . series of blog posts with today’s blog post being Figshare as a data repository. This will be followed in the coming weeks by Figshare as a paper repository, Figshare as a preprints server, Figshare as a thesis repository and Figshare as an all in one repository. Each blog post will have a supporting webinar to get an in depth overview of Figshare in that context.
By Patrick Splawa-Neyman, Product Specialist at Figshare.
Sign up for the Figshare as a data repository webinar.
There has been a great deal of discussion in recent months about Figshare becoming an institutional repository, or what I like to call an all in one repository. And while we all like our technology to evolve to make life easier for us, let's not forget the rudiments of Figshare. Figshare started as a data repository; a place to share and get credit for the outputs that do not fit in to a standard paper publication. This evolved into a place for researchers to make their data open to support a journal article publication. Since then the academic community have developed a number of novel applications for our technology, which has been one of the fortuitous things to come from building an open platform. We are firm believers that figshare is and will continue to be the most developed data repository platform.
On my travels around Australasia there are many conversations about government reporting and the need to prove to the institution that Figshare provides value beyond its core functionality.
Figshare can certainly assist with reporting research activities but it’s primarily a tool aimed at researchers to help them to store, share and publish their research data. Or in other words it's a research data management tool for researchers, and that’s something that can be very difficult to quantify.
For me that raises the question of what is data? When I'm speaking with customers I prefer to say to them not that Figshare is for data, but that it’s for digital files. Often the problem with the term data is that when people think of data they think of Excel spreadsheets and CSV files from the STEM disciplines. But data can be an audio or video recording of a poetry recital, it can be a survey, it can be a government report, or code or any of a multitude of file types that are the product of research activity. One of the core drivers of Figshare is for researchers to get credit for all of their research. If they have spent time creating an output, there’s a good chance one of their peers could use it and build upon it, so they should get the recognition and citation in the same way they would for a publication. Enhancing the reputation and recognition of non-traditional research outputs (NTROs) is our founding mission and remains an integral motivation for us.While Figshare is continually evolving some of the core functionality of Figshare includes:
And fundamentally Figshare is about supporting research. It's about researchers deciding what digital files they want to store, who they want to share them with, and if they chose to publish them to support their research. Figshare allows researchers to retain control of their digital files throughout the research data lifecycle.
In our upcoming series of blogs we’ll look at how Figshare (which started life as a data repository) is expanding into other types of repositories such as a preprints repository.
So stay tuned as we look to the future of Figshare as well as how some of our existing customers are using Figshare beyond just a data repository.
We’ve had many a conversation at Figshare about the way people consume the research outputs that are shared through the site. Whilst we all agree that no one ever is just ‘browsing’ academic content, the browse page allows users to filter content to find exactly what they are after. However, customised feeds of content and being notified that colleagues, or areas of research have new datasets or code available would be a huge step in discovering relevant research outputs.
So that is what we have built.
This extensive feature allows a user to “follow” many different aspects across the platform. This might mean updates from a particular author or group. Here’s a full list of the things you can keep track of:
When on any of these entities, you’ll see the ability to follow, e.g. saved searches (which also now build a URL as you add to them):https://figshare.com/search?q=%3Acategory%3A%20%22Stem%20Cells%22&searchMode=1&licenses=1%2C2&types=2%2C4%2C5%2C
When you have some follow sets, you can manage them under “Account settings”. Under this section, you can label terms to be more manageable, search them, generate RSS links, unfollow or be taken to a context-sensitive representation e.g. followed authors will be taken to author page, search terms taken to search page. You can follow 50 sets maximum and receive up to 10 sets by email in a daily or weekly digest.
E.g. https://figshare.com/rss/general?search=%3Acategory%3A%20%22Stem%20Cells%22&types=2%2C4%2C5%2C9
The functionality is live on the site now, so get following!
You can also see this feature across all of the repositories we are running for institutions, publishers, and funders.
If you are interested in hearing whether these ideas would be a good fit at your institution, please get in touch at support@figshare.com or via twitter, facebook or google+.
We’re delighted to announce our partnership with SAGE publishing to improve the discoverability of supplemental material they publish for their authors, as well as supporting the display of this material online. Sara Miller McCune founded SAGE publishing in 1965 to support the dissemination of usable knowledge and educate a global community. SAGE is a leading international provider of innovative, high-quality content publishing more than 1,000 journals and over 800 new books each year, spanning a wide range of subject areas.
We are working together to integrate the new services across existing journal workflows, supporting SAGE journal authors by submitting supplemental material to Figshare concurrent with article publication online. The services will help SAGE journal authors to preserve and manage their material and collaborate on research projects, whilst ensuring their supplemental material is widely accessible.
Bob Howard, Senior Vice President of Global Journals, SAGE Publishing, commented: \"SAGE has a commitment to our authors to enable and support them in publishing the best global research and to help facilitate accessibility to this research. This new partnership with Figshare will help to enhance our offerings to authors, enabling improved discoverability and public accessibility of their research supplemental material, making it more transparent through forward thinking services and content features.\"
Mark Hahnel, CEO and Founder of Figshare, said: “We’re excited to be working with SAGE to showcase and promote their authors’ data in an accessible way.”
The Figshare platform includes interactive visualization tools that help to bring research data to life. It also enables researchers to measure the impact of their supplemental material by providing metrics on how many views, shares, citations, and downloads they receive.
Figshare has been integrated across participating SAGE journals since March 2018. For more information, visit SAGE’s new portal within the Figshare platform at sage.figshare.com. To view the Figshare integration on the SAGE Journals platform, please see the following example: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/0010414018758756.
We've been increasingly asked about the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), coming into force in May, and how we are preparing for this. For those unaware, the GDPR is the new European law that will regulate the use and protection of data relating to an identified or identifiable individual (i.e. personal data). Many of the GDPR’s main concepts and principles are similar to those under existing European law, although there are new elements and significant enhancements.
What are we doing to prepare for GDPR?
Data protection is something we care deeply about at Figshare, so we are working hard to ensure that we’ll be fully compliant with the GDPR when it comes into effect, having carried out a detailed data mapping exercise across our business, ensuring data protection by design and updating our policies and procedures. We’re also reviewing all our vendors (like AWS), finding out about their GDPR plans and making sure they have all their ducks in a row.
The Figshare product team are dedicating significant time to defining the GDPR roadmap. Over the next month, the team will be working to ensure users can delete the personal data linked to their account within the account settings area - this will allow the deletion of private data, public comments and comments/notes in a project. Users will also be able to download all the data we store about them from the account settings area.
We will be creating a new email notifications page and also amending our sign up form to enable more control over the emails you receive.
Where we process personal data on an organisation’s behalf, our contract will likely need to be updated to meet the new requirements of the GDPR. We have developed a GDPR contract addendum for this purpose, which is intended to replace the existing data protection provisions in our customer contracts when the GDPR comes into effect. Please contact support@figshare.com and we will provide a copy, which will need to be signed and returned.
For our Figshare.com users - there are no steps that you need to make, but please do read our Privacy Policy for more information (see below).
Security under the GDPR
Security of personal data will continue to be an important principle under the GDPR and has always been a priority at Figshare, as such, Figshare is delighted to have been awarded ISO 27001 certification. Further details of our security standards are available on the Knowledge Portal.
Our Privacy Policy
Individual users who have agreed to our Privacy Policy may also be interested to know that this will be updated in the coming months to ensure it meets the (extensive) new information requirements of the GDPR. However, we don’t plan to use the personal data we process for anything new.
Any questions?
We will continue to update you with more information via the Figshare blog and social media accounts. If you need any more information, please feel free to contact us at info@Figshare.com.
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