TL;DR - Message to David Willetts and the UK government is this. Well done on such a positive move, please don't mess this up. You don't need to reinvent the wheel and you do need to mandate licensing at least as un-restrictive as CC-BY.

It is a proud day to be British, for good intentions at least! UK minister of state for universities and science David Willetts announced on Tuesday in a piece in the Guardian that the UK would be making all publicly funded research openly available to all: "Giving people the right to roam freely over publicly funded research will usher in a new era of academic discovery and collaboration, and will put the U.K. at the forefront of open research".

Eric Merkel-Sobotta, executive vice president for corporate communications at Springer, offers a more pessimistic view with his comments in The Chronicle. Given the lack of details so far, "it's too early to say whether this will be a success," he said of the plan. "It looks like setting off fireworks, but nobody's really sure what holiday we're celebrating."

He has a point. But let us not digress from the significance of this. The UK government is committing to changing the way that we do science. But open access has been around for years you say. True. But for a long time researchers have been dismissive about the benefits of open access, when closed access publishing can help their career. It isn't the fault of researchers. I'm talking from experience here. I know the pressure of wanting to advance my career through publishing in the journals with the highest Impact Factor. It is only relatively recently that I learnt just how messed up the scientific publication process has become. Take the Impact factor for instance:

• The Impact Factor is negotiable and doesn't reflect actual citation counts (source)
• The Impact Factor cannot be reproduced, even if it reflected actual citations (source)
• The Impact Factor is not statistically sound, even if it were reproducible and reflected actual citations (source)

At figshare, we work on the principles of carrots and sticks. We are here for the researcher. We allow users to make all of their research publicly available, visualisable in the browser at no cost, whether this is a pdf or a video. We give you metrics on your research so you can track the true impact you are having. We try to make the barrier to this technology so low that anyone who can operate a computer can share their research outputs with the world. These are the carrots. Researchers also need sticks. The NSF in the USA have mandated that all researchers have data management plans. The UK government needs to make sure that they see this through, that UK academic institutions ensure that their researchers use the repository or whatever they are planning. The Royal Society current study on Science as a public enterprise is already addressing the ever changing face of scientific research and the way it should be disseminated. The government is committing £2 million to this, if we end up with a UK wide version of an institutional repository the enthusiasm for this forward thinking mentality would be slightly lost.

"We support any and all sustainable models of access that ensure the integrity and permanence of the scholarly record. Such options include 'gold' open access, whereby publication is funded by an article publishing charge paid by the author or another sponsor, a subscription-based journal, or any one of a number of hybrid publishing options.

We believe that authors should be able to publish in the journal of their choice, where publication will have the greatest potential to advance their field. Institutions and funders have a key role to play in ensuring that public access policies allow for funding of peer reviewed publication and publishing services in whatever journal that an author chooses."

Martin Hall, a member of the Finch working group who is the vice-chancellor of Salford University speaking on nature blogs, reckons that ultimately we will see a transition to gold - so the real question is how long this will take.

For me this raises a bigger question. The British government is pioneering in attempting to do the right thing through open access, but there is a danger that a lot of the value from this open access research will still be trapped. A good example of how to do this right is PLoS. All PLoS journals are licensed under CC-BY. Michael Eisen lists some scientific publisher that have chosen to use creative commons licenses with extended clauses on his blog. Mike Taylor discusses the implications of these clauses very clearly on his blog:

"Although these additional clauses are intuitively appealing, they typically have unintended consequences that hamper the reusability of information published in this way"

These clauses will not allow the researchers to "roam freely over publicly funded research". So my message to David Willetts and the UK government is this. Well done on such a positive move, please don't mess this up. You don't need to reinvent the wheel and you do need to mandate licensing at least as un-restrictive as CC-BY.

At figshare, one of the things we are looking to create, is a place where as much research data as possible can be visualised in the browser, regardless of the file format. It is often the case with traditional publishers, that you can only upload your research in a strict number of formats.

This is something that figshare aims to fix. To this end, this week we updated the platform with a range of updates focussed around visualising data. Increasingly research is being produced in new formats which traditional publishers do not support.

Heather Piwowar raised this point in her response to the US government's request for information Request for Information: 'Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications Resulting From Federally Funded Research', when she stated "A public science funder has both a right and a responsibility to communicate its findings in the most generative form it can. Projects funded with public money must be conducted under this premise."

For this reason, datasets, videos, code and text files should not be demoted to the supplemental data sections of papers where they exist as downloadable links. Researchers need to have a look at the file before assessing whether the information is present with the file. We have also added the filesizes in the right sidebar, as had been requested by users.

As well as providing in browser support for an ever expanding list of file formats, we also introduced the interactive pop-up viewer to explore the research in greater detail. The example below shows csv data which can be sorted by column within the browser. The raw data can be copied and pasted directly out of the page, or eyeballed before choosing to download the paper.

The pop up browser is also a great way to browse through filesets, as can be seen below. In order to cater for the growing need for a life science preprint paper , we have added functionality in terms of reading the pdfs in the browser.

As noted previously on this blog, by referencing the datasets hosted on figshare the content that can be addressed in a single paper becomes unlimited, whilst also helping aid the discovery of the research. This can also be done as a way of archiving research connected to papers that are already in print that would otherwise never see the light of day.

Uploading data for an in press paper to @Figshare. Loving this easy medium to archive more of my stuff!

— Andrew A. Farke (@andyfarke) April 24, 2012

As always we would love to hear your feedback, comments and suggestions to make figshare better for you! Ideas are welcomed at info@figshare.com or via twitter, facebook or google+.

figshare and the CLOCKSS Archive have partnered to preserve figshare's publically available content in CLOCKSS's geographically and geopolitically distributed network of redundant archive nodes, located at 12 major research libraries around the world. This action provides for content to be freely available to everyone after a "trigger event" and ensures an author's work will be maximally accessible and useful over time.

CLOCKSS (Controlled LOCKSS) is a not for profit joint venture between the world's leading scholarly publishers and research libraries whose mission is to build a sustainable, geographically distributed dark archive with which to ensure the long-term survival of Web-based scholarly publications for the benefit of the greater global research community.

CLOCKSS Executive Director Randy S. Kiefer had this to say, "The CLOCKSS Archive welcomes figshare's data into the community's archive. By archiving with CLOCKSS, figshare has ensured that their data, which includes figures, datasets and video files will be available for a worldwide audience now and in the future. We are grateful, as figshare joins the CLOCKSS Archive, for its generous willingness to preserve its content in a way that secures them for the long-term good of scholars worldwide."

As always, feedback, comments, suggestions and ideas are welcomed at info@figshare.com or via twitter, facebook or google+.

For those who don't know about them, a preprint is a draft of a scientific paper that has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Nature Precedings was an open access electronic preprint repository of scholarly work in the fields of biomedical sciences, chemistry, and earth sciences that released the following statement on their homepage this week:

"As of April 3rd 2012, we will cease to accept submissions to Nature Precedings. Nature Precedings will then be archived, and the archive will be maintained by NPG, while all hosted content will remain freely accessible to all."

Following this announcement, tweeters and bloggers began to suggest alternative solutions for this simple, open access format for immediate publication of research, including figshare.

RT @IanMulvany: One current alternative to Nature precedings is figshare figshare.com

— Grace Baynes (@grace_baynes) March 30, 2012

The Tree of Life Blog

"one of the alternatives to NP is FigShare (which is pretty cool)"

Analog Machine Blog

"The good news is that there are still at least two other organizations that support a preprint service, namely the venerable arXiv located out of Cornell University and now also figshare"

arXiv is enormously success in physics, and it currently receives nearly 7000 submissions/month.

Even more interesting is the Google scholar independent h5 index that came out this week, which listed the top publications based on citation counts.

Non peer-reviewed Arxiv came in at number 5, ahead of prestigious journals such as The Lancet, Cell, and PNAS.

So what is different about this new measure from Google to the established Impact Factor from Thomson Reuters? Bjorn Brembs, a PI at the Freie Universitat Berlin has previously described some reasons why researchers should notbe relying on the impact factor.

1. The IF is negotiable and doesn't reflect actual citation counts (source)

2. The IF cannot be reproduced, even if it reflected actual citations (source)

3. The IF is not statistically sound, even if it were reproducible and reflected actual citations (source)

It appears that google scholar must agree if they feel the need to develop a whole new metric to measure scholarly journals.

So the future for preprints looks bright indeed. If you are looking for somewhere to put your preprint publications, you can upload them in seconds to figshare, where they are openly available to all for free.

As always, feedback, comments, suggestions and ideas are welcomed at info@figshare.com or via twitter, facebook or google+.

Until recently, we were unaware of iEvoBio, a forum bringing together biologists working in evolution, systematics, and biodiversity, with software developers, and mathematicians.

However an innovative competition called Synthesizing Phylogenies drew our gaze. The competition is being run in collaboration with it's sister meeting Evolution 2012. The principles behind the contest are explained here:

''Somewhere, buried in large sets of trees, lies a stunning new revelation, a baffling discovery, the answer to a longstanding controversy, or simply something not obvious to the naked eye. The mission of the 2012 iEvoBio challenge is to find those revelations, discoveries and answers within your own data and/or within one of the datasets provided by the challenge. What new scientifically interesting results can you pull from these trees, using any combination of techniques at your disposal?''

The rules can be found on the iEvoBio Website, and the organisers ''strongly encourage making your dataset publicly available for reuse''. They recommend figshare as a place to do this:

''figshare accepts data without a publication. Depositing your data in an archive has a variety of advantages over simply posting them on a website, notably that they can be cited, and those citations can be tracked.''

We look forward to seeing your entries into the conversation on figshare, where you can also track the metrics on your data whilst making it citable. As always, feedback, comments, suggestions and ideas are welcomed at info@figshare.com or via twitter, facebook or google+. Good luck!

figshare was recently featured in a nature materials paper that all researchers should see. The paper provides a list of useful tools for researchers to use in order to make the best use of their time and get credit for all of their hard work.

"Strong competition and funding squeezes require scientists to look for ways to increase their profile and impact within and beyond the scientific community. Online tools and services can help them communicate and publicize their research more effectively."

As a researcher, I actively sought out ways to make my research more effective using online tools. However, it was apparent that awareness within the lab was a problem, even with PhD students. So if you know about tools like figshare, and you find them useful, why not let your fellow researchers know about them!

Unfortunately unlike figshare, nature does not allow researchers to cite individual objects yet, but here is the table of researcher tools¹:

Table 1: Useful online tools and services for scientists, the examples are either entirely free or available in a free version.

Does this list look complete to you? Are there any other tools that you find essential as a researcher? We'd love to hear your thoughts. As always, feedback, comments, suggestions and ideas are welcomed at info@figshare.com or via twitter, facebook or google+.

[1] One-click science marketing, Martin Fenner, Nature Materials 11,261-263 (2012) doi:10.1038/nmat3283

Published online 22 March 2012

As with so much of scholarly communication these days, an interesting conversation has played out on twitter this week. It all started with a fantastic idea for authors to retain copyright from Prof. Lorena A. Barba, a professor in Mechanical Engineering at Boston University.

Idea: upload figures to @figshare under CC-BY and add citation to my own figures in my own paper before submitting so journal can't own them

— Lorena Barba (@LorenaABarba) March 14, 2012

This was heavily retweeted, so it seems that lots of researchers object to handing over their copyright to publishers. Some however pointed out potential flaws in this process:

@JosephJEsposito @figshare If a journal declines to publish a manuscript just because the figures are CC-BY, lesson is never submit there

— Lorena Barba (@LorenaABarba) March 14, 2012

This is a fantastic point. We can, as researchers control the rights to our research.This has been something that some of the world's leading Universities have begun to insist on, with Harvard taking the stand in 2008 and Princeton recently following suit:

"Prestigious US academic institution Princeton University will prevent researchers from giving the copyright of scholarly articles to journal publishers"

But what about the Ingelfinger Rule. For those who don't know, the Ingelfinger rule stipulates that a scientist may not publish the same original research in two different outlets. It was created in 1969 by Franz J. Ingelfinger, who at the time was editor of The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), as an effort to prevent NEJM from losing originality. It has also been suggested that `that the real reason for the Ingelfinger rule is to protect the journals' revenue stream`.

When talking to researchers about making their research outputs available of figshare and the benefits of sharing their research in this way, both personal and for the good of science, a common response is that they are scared of compromising a future publication by having parts of the work already on the web. This is a common misconception and a great fear amongst postdocs who live in fear of making a mistake which may harm their career prospects. This, ironically is the uneducated view.

A great source of information on the current state of publisher's opinions on the Ingelfinger rule comes from F1000. Their soon to be launched, innovative journal F1000 research has a page dedicated to it. Included here is a list from that page of journals and publishers that have confirmed that they would not view publication of datasets with a DOI and associated protocol information as prior publication.

BMC journals

BMJ Group journals

Elsevier journals

IOS Press journals

The Lancet journals

Nature-titled journals

PLoS journals

RSC journals

SAGE journals

Adv Clin Neurosci Rehabil

Bioinformatics

Cardiovasc Ther

Ecol Lett

Eur J Neurosci

Int J Obstet Anesth

J Clin Invest

J Eat Disord

J Neurol

J Neurosci

J Pain

J Plant Ecol

Neurourol Urodyn

New Engl J Med

Proc Natl Acad Sci USA

PROTEOMICS J

Science

Respondents that would see the publication of data with a DOI and protocol information as potential prior publication:

Cell Press journals

Ann Oncol

As can be seen from this list of responders, the overwhelming majority support this. So it is not I am going to publish in Annals of Oncology because there are no more prestigious journals who will accept my research. So why do they insist on it? To improve their sales? I doubt the nature preprint service nature preceedings has harmed the profits of nature (if I am wrong about this, please correct me).

So to sum up, the tide is turning - the majority of publishers now ignore the ingelfinger rule. Innovative journals such as PLoS are embracing new technologies as opposed to putting up barriers to research. Rather than protecting their profits, it seems to me that the publishers who maintain these barriers to research will be those that pay the ultimate price. The forward thinking, innovative publishers who continually work with the needs of researchers will be the ones who turn their current, threatened business model into the business model that can be successful for the next 300 years.

Prof. Barba has continued to show how her innovative thinking is bringing her success. Here's hoping that many more PI's continue to educate their students and postdocs that the scope of scholarly publishing is changing, there are new ways to get credit for your research and with everything, it is the early adopters who will reap the greatest benefit!

I uploaded 3 figures to @figshare 2 days ago, and already have >500 views. A sign of increased impact via #openscience? figshare.com/authors/Lorena�

— Lorena Barba (@LorenaABarba) March 19, 2012

Guest post by figshare user Ross Mounce. Ross is a PhD student at the University of Bath, and Systematics Association council member. His research is on the importance of fossils in phylogeny. In the course of this work he often encounters unnecessary barriers to research: lack of data sharing, lack of online data availability, and lack of data in usable digital formats. Thus he regularly campaigns for scholarly reform, particularly with regard to the provision of Open Data for science.

Research Councils UK (RCUK) - a partnership of seven core UK research funding bodies (AHRC, BBSRC, EPSRC, ESRC, MRC, NERC, and STFC), has recently released a very welcome draft policy document detailing their proposed Open Access mandate, for all research which they help fund.

The new proposed policies include (quoting from the draft):

"Peer reviewed research papers which result from research that is wholly or partially funded by the Research Councils must be published in journals which are compliant with Research Council policy on Open Access."




"Research papers which result from research that is wholly or partially funded by the Research Councils should ideally be made Open Access on publication, and must be made Open Access after no longer than the Research Councils'maximum acceptable embargo period". [6 months for all except AHRC & ESRC for which 12 months is the maximum delay permitted].




"...researchers are strongly encouraged to publish their work in compliance with the policy as soon as possible". [added emphasis, mine]

As a researcher funded by BBSRC myself - I'm thrilled to read this document. It shows a clear understanding of the issues, including explicit statements on the need of different types of access - both manual AND automated:

"The existing policy will be clarified by specifically stating that Open Access includes unrestricted use of manual and automated text and data mining tools. Also, that it allows unrestricted re-use of content with proper attribution - as defined by the Creative Commons CC-BY licence"

 

But as a strong supporter of the Panton Principles for Open Data in Science, and Science Code Manifesto, I'm a little disappointed that the policy improvements with respect to data and code access are comparatively minor. Such underlying research materials need only be 'accessible' with few further stipulations as to how. AFAIK this allows researchers to make their data available via pigeon-transport (only) on Betamax tapes, 10 years after the data was generated *if there is no 'best practice' standard in one's field.

The BBSRC's data sharing policy for example seems to favour cost-effectiveness over transparency: "It should also be cost effective and the data shared should be of the highest quality." and maddeningly seems to give researchers ownership over data, even though the data was obtained using BBSRC-funding: "Ownership of the data generated from the research that BBSRC funds resides with the investigators and their institutions." This seems rather devoid of logic to me - if taxpayers paid for this data to be created, surely they should have some ownership of it? Finally "Where best practice does not exist, release of data within three years of its generation is suggested." 3 years huh? And that's only a suggestion! Does anyone actually check that data is made available after those 3 years? I suspect not.

Admittedly, it would be hard to create a good one-size fits all policy, and policing it would cost more money, but I do feel that data & code sharing policies could be tightened-up in places, to enable more frictionless sharing, re-using and building-on previous research outputs.

So all in all this is a great step in the right direction towards Open Scholarship, particularly for BBB-compliant Open Access.

Related reactions and comments which are highly worth reading include posts by Casey Bergman, Peter Suber, and Richard Van Noorden.

As we have previously noted, traditional journals often have limits on the number of files that you can put into the paper, even as supplemental information.The use of figshare to break open the restraints of current traditional publishing models has been demonstrated this week in a publication in PLoS ONE:

Roberts SB, Hauser L, Seeb LW, Seeb JE (2012) Development of Genomic Resources for Pacific Herring through Targeted Transcriptome Pyrosequencing. PLoS ONE 7(2): e30908. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0030908

By referencing the datasets hosted on figshare (Refs. 10 & 11), the content that can be addressed in a single paper becomes unlimited, whilst also helping aid the discovery of the research.

As pointed out by GigaScience on google+, 'this follows DCC best practice guidelines, and shows journals are starting to adopt and get used to data-citation.'

Recently, we have noticed users questioning what they can and cannot upload and make citable through figshare. The general theory is that if you think it is of value, and you would like some credit for your hard work, figshare can accommodate it! We love that researchers are using the platform to share their research in innovative ways by uploading in the last week:

- Dissertations

- Grant applications

- Research notes

- Posters

Obviously, this is on top of any images, videos or datasets which may be of value to the research community.

We're really excited to see new and innovative ways to make the platform as useful for researchers as possible, so please continue to pleasantly surprise us! As always, feedback, comments, suggestions and ideas are welcomed at info@figshare.com or via twitter, facebook or google+.

Researchers are finding more and more innovative ways to share their research on figshare. It's always fascinating to see users come up with ideas that hadn't yet crossed our minds. An example of one occasion when this happened was at Science Online in January, where Antony Williams of ChemSpider, fed up of not having access to his own publications stated that in future, he would upload a copy to figshare so he'd always have access.

I was reminded of this when I saw some uploads by Jan Halborg Jenson. He has uploaded his funded grant applications, and has described his reasoning for doing so in a blog post on the 'Proteins and Wave Functions' blog.

In this post Jan explains that some words from mathematician Doron Zeilberger motivated him to share his grant applications with the world:

"Mathematics and Science is a communal enterprise, and it is very important that people share their ideas."

"People are at their expository best when they are begging for money, and in the case of mathematicians and scientists, this means writing a grant proposal. The scientific community would benefit a lot if people would publicly post their funded grants, and be generous with their ideas."

Also uploaded this week was a poster by Walter Jessen. The poster "identifies therapeutic areas with candidate or validated biomarkers, and highlights those areas where a paucity of biomarkers exists." What makes this really interetiong is that Walter isn't the first to use this approach. Ross Mounce has previously uploaded his poster from the Palaeontology Association's 55th annual meeting entitled 'Methods of determining cranial and postcranial character congruence'.

Ross summed up his reasoning for making the poster citable and discoverable on figshare in the following way:

"The problem is much of the data, and code used to analyse and summarise research is rarely conveyed in immediately useful, digital formats with scholarly communications (e.g. outlined in this talk). Indeed as I discovered at the Open Knowledge Conference in Berlin later this year - this is a problem we share with many other areas of academia (it's certainly not just palaeontology!), Guo Xu in particular expressed how difficult it was to extract and re-analyse data from economic research papers, for instance.

So, I thought I'd try out for myself to see how easy it is to make the underlying data & code behind a research publication (in this case, just a poster) available in readily re-usable digital formats. I can't say it took no time at all, and perhaps I haven't released everything in the most Open way possible (feel free to point out my shortcomings if you so wish), but I feel this is certainly a step in the right direction. At the very least, I hope these bits of code and data will help as instructive teaching examples."

We're really excited to see new and innovative ways to make the platform as useful for researchers as possible, so please continue to pleasantly surprise us! As always, feedback, comments, suggestions and ideas are welcomed at info@figshare.com or via twitter, facebook or google+.

figshare is in San Francisco this week for the Strata conference. If you are going to be at the conference, or if you are San Francisco based and would like us to come and present thoughts on figshare and open science at your lab meeting or journal club, let us know at info@figshare.com or via twitter, facebook or google+.

I'll be presenting with Ben Goldacre and Kaitlin Thaney on Thursday 1st March with the panel discussing the title `It's Not "Junk" [Data] Anymore`:

In a research environment, under the current operating system, most data and figures collected or generated during your work is lost, intentionally tossed aside or classified as "junk", or at worst trapped in silos or locked behind embargo periods. This stifles and limits scientific research at its core, making it much more difficult to validate experiments, reproduce experiments or even stumble upon new breakthroughs that may be buried in your null results.

Changing this reality not only takes the right tools and technology to store, sift and publish data, but also a shift in the way we think of and value data as a scientific contribution in the research process. In the digital age, we're not bound by the physical limitations of analog medium such as the traditional scientific journal or research paper, nor should our data be locked into understandings based off that medium.

This session will look at the socio-cultural context of data science in the research environment, specifically at the importance of publishing negative results through tools like figshare - an open data project that fosters data publication, not only for supplementary information tied to publication, but all of the back end information needed to reproduce and validate the work, as well as the negative results. We'll hear about the broader cultural shift needed in how we incentivise better practices in the lab and how companies like Digital Science are working to use technology to push those levers to address the social issue. The session will also include a look at the real-world implications in clinical research and medicine from Ben Goldacre, an epidemiologist who has been looking at not only the ethical consequences but issues in efficacy and validation.

The fact that open science is getting some prime time attention demonstrates both the need, and the potential of releasing huge amounts of data and re-analysing it using new technologies. The title of the conference is 'Making data work' - we should as researchers be doing this. And the technology that will be talked about at the conference should inspire new ideas of how better to manage research data. The first step you can make to help make science more efficient and to get more credit for all of the hours of work you pour into your research, is to put some of your research outputs up on figshare!

As always, feedback, comments, suggestions and ideas are welcomed at info@figshare.com or via twitter, facebook or google+.

By creating an environment where users can make all of their research objects available in a citable, sharable and discoverable manner, figshare is offering a form of publication and dissemination of your research. Openness on data has another important aspect: the fight against scientific fraud. For this reason we have become a member of 'The Committee of Publication Ethics' - COPE, in order to adhere to the best guidelines for research publication and dissemination.

The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) was established in 1997 by a small group of medical journal editors in the UK but now has over 7000 members worldwide from all academic fields. Membership is open to editors of academic journals and others interested in publication ethics. Several major publishers (including Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Palgrave Macmillan and Wolters Kluwer) have signed up their journals as COPE members.

As always, feedback, comments, suggestions and ideas are welcomed at info@figshare.com or via twitter, facebook or google+.

Have you ever found yourself limited by the constraints of a journal? Traditional journals often have limits on the number of files that you can put into the paper, even as supplemental information. We now have the technology to easily make all of the supporting information available, and yet are limited by journal restrictions. The examples below show limits both in terms of number and physical size:

Nature Policy

"We prefer to accept no more than ten files. Sound/movie files and combined, single PDFs may be up to 30 MB per file, with the maximum cumulative size of all files not exceeding 150 MB."

Journal of Neuroscience Policy

"Beginning November 1, 2010, The Journal of Neuroscience will no longer allow authors to include supplemental material when they submit new manuscripts and will no longer host supplemental material on its web site for those articles. When articles are published, authors will be allowed to include a footnote with a URL that points to supplemental material on a site they support and maintain, together with a brief description of what the supplemental material includes, but that supplemental material will not be reviewed or hosted by The Journal."

This is another way in which figshare can help. With figshare you can add as much supplemental data to a publication as you wish, for free. The links are persistent and you even get the metrics on these research objects to see the true reach of your research.

Researchers have already started to use figshare as a store for research data that is linked to traditional publications as can be seen in the links below:

Thornton, A. 2012. Archaeologists-in-Training: Students of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, 1920-1936. Journal of Open Archaeology Data, 1(1),

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/4f293686e4d62

Which links to: hdl.handle.net/10779/bf017bbfaf9063551acc6d82a9f54e40

An exploratory analysis of combined genome-wide SNP data from several recent studies Blaise Li (2011)

http://arxiv.org/abs/1101.5519

Which links to multiple files uploaded to figshare by the author:

http://figshare.com/authors/BlaiseLi/96478

As can be seen in the examples, the data can be linked both ways. The figshare article should also be added to the reference list, so that we can track extra citations for you. By providing more descriptive titles of this extra content, the research becomes more discoverable via google. This in turn can drive more traffic to your original publication, giving your research even more impact!

As always, feedback, comments, suggestions and ideas are welcomed at info@figshare.com or via twitter, facebook or google+.

A recent report from the Committee of Economic Development called "The Future of Taxpayer-Funded Research: Who Will Control Access to the Results?" details the importance of getting research out to the masses quickly:

"For researchers, developments that increase the speed and breadth of dissemination of cutting-edge research accelerate their own research production."

http://www.ced.org/images/content/issues/innovation-technology/DCCReport_Final_2_9-12.pdf

We have previously talked about researchers uploading their data to YouTube, Flickr or onto blogs - which can be a brilliant way for researchers to disseminate their research data using existing web based technology.

So why is there a problem with this? A recent study by the Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group illustrates how over the course of a year, several artifacts that they were tracking were lost, 10% in fact.

"In conclusion, after only one year more than 10% of the media that we thought we have stored for future generations was gone. If the decay continued at the same rate and if we didn't do anything to preserve this digital heritage of the revolution in less than 10 years there will be no story to tell for the future generations and we will lose these magnificent collections that can show what thousands of books couldn't convey."

http://ws-dl.blogspot.com/2012/02/2012-02-11-losing-my-revolution-year.html

So this is why we need repositories like figshare, that offer a security, back-ups and persistence of the research data, whilst making it publicly citable and discoverable. The University of Cambridge (http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/dataman/pages/repositories.html) offers more reasons why you should be uploading your research to repositories:

Many researchers hold on to an old computer from a decade or two ago because it is the only way to access their old files, created in formats that are now obsolete. Once these computers break, the files are essentially lost. Many repositories store and back up your treasured research products and will, if appropriate file formats are used, attempt to move the data into new file formats as the original formats become obsolete. So long as the repository exists, your materials will remain readable and usable.

BMC have set up a fantastic list of repositories where researchers can store their data, including figshare. figshare aims to cater for all of the data management needs of researchers, by providing users with 1GB of free secure, private cloud space as well as unlimited public space. The upload process take seconds and you're images, datasets, videos or any other file formats can be citable in less than a minute.

As always we would love to hear your feedback, comments and suggestions to make figshare better for you! Ideas are welcomed at info@figshare.com or via twitter, facebook or google+.

Following on from Science Online 2012, I made my way to New York to join Science Online NYC, or #sonyc. The monthly meet-up is set at Rockefeller University and organised by Lou Woodley (Nature) Jeanne Garbarino (Science 3.0) and John Timmer (ARS Technica). John summed up the discussion in the following way:

"Scientific papers are still the primary way of getting information on research out to the rest of the scientific community. But they also tend to generate lots of data-negative or confusing results-that will never make it into a paper. And there are many other ways that researchers can contribute to their field that don't fit neatly into papers, like making a new tool or building a database."

Also talking were:

Carol Feltes is the head librarian at Rockefeller University.

Veronique Kiermer is an Executive Editor and Head of Researcher Services at Nature, and a member of the ORCID steering committee.

Cathy Nortion is the library scholar at the Biodiversity Heritage Library at Woods Hole's Marine Biological Laboratory.

The full discussion was livestreamed and the video can be seen below.

As always, feedback, comments, suggestions and ideas are welcomed at info@figshare.com or via twitter, facebook or google+.

The launch of the new figshare site recently was immediately swamped by the chaos that is the Science Online conference in North Carolina. The conference, which also goes by the name #scio12 is one of the most interesting and best organised of all conferences I have been to.

"Artwork at Open Notebook Science session, by Kwinkunks"

Also fun this time was the new figshare swag that I had to disperse into the crowds of researchers, science bloggers an journalists, and fellow data management folk.

@pkrautz @figshare Love the mug! And the site, of course ;-) But websites can't hold coffee...

— Psi Wavefunction (@PsiWavefunction) January 25, 2012

The t-shirts come went out to many of the attendees and #openscientists in the mix, as well as the odd mascot (image provided by @DrRubidium).

Some great conversations about the future of data management and how different organisations can pull together over a common goal we're had over some North Carolina ales. Representatives from Mendeley, PLoS, Wikipedia, Altmetric, Total Impact, ScienceCard and the Open Science Federation all discussed ideas about working both with each other and with figshare in order to make researchers life easier, as well as making science more available and measuring the true real-time impact of science.

If you would like to get your hands on some of the swag, you can invite figshare along to do a demo in your lab or talk at your lab meetings or journal clubs. If you are UK based we can arrange to come whenever. We will ne in the US at the end of February and beginning of March (as well as a few other dates no doubt). If you are based elsewhere, let us know and we will endeavour to get to you!

We have lots of new features coming in the pipeline and will continue to develop the site. If you have any thoughts or comments, please let us know at info@figshare.com or via twitter, facebook or google+. In the hectic launch, we forgot to update our blog's RSS feed. You can now find this at http://figshare.com/blog/feed - be sure to subscribe.

Sorry, we couldn't resist the title, but we also realise the irony given the general failure of the attempts to build a "facebook for Scientists". But scientists dont necessarily need a facebook, they have facebook. So why would scientists need a YouTube?

Researchers do use YouTube to publish their results and increase awareness about their research, examples can be seen here, here and here.

The media like videos too, as can be seen with this great clip showing a natural killer T-cell attacking disease cell on video, published on the Nature Medicine YouTube Channel.

This video is taken from an article in PLoS Biology. Or rather, is downloadable from the supplementary materials of said article.

If it was easy to cite these videos in a manner by which all authors receive credit, we wouldn't have an issue. I first came across this problem when trying to cite a video in my thesis, in which I wanted to show mesenchymal stem cells proliferating and not migrating. This is quite a difficult idea to quantify in text.

So figshare allows researchers to easily upload video (and other media forms) of their research, so that it is easily searchable, citable and sharable. Researchers can add as much context as they wish, and all authors will have a profile page with links to all of their research objects, including videos, on figshare.

All videos have view counts, share buttons, embed functionality as well as QR codes. For those not familiar with QR codes, they act as a bar code which links directly to a webpage when scanned with a phone or tablet app. By adding these in addition to a standard link to the page when citing a video on figshare, the videos can be easily viewed even when the reader only has a paper copy of the article.

The potential to enhance research publication in this way was highlighted in May 2011, when Cell Press published their journal with an interactive cover.

"On the cover: Where's the cover image? In this issue, Cell experiments with the use of Quick Response (QR) barcodes to create more interactive PDFs. We kick off the issue with a barcode linking to Cell's first animated cover. To view the cover, download a barcode reader for your smartphone or tablet (e.g., i-nigma for iPhones and Androids) and then snap a picture of the cover. The app will link to an animated movie on the web. Can you find the 16 other QR barcodes in this issue?The hidden animation on the cover shows circulating erythrocytes with two cells infected by malaria parasites from the genus Plasmodium. Intracellular parasites acquire nutrients via the plasmodial surface anion channel (PSAC) on the host membrane. http://www.cell.com/archive"

You may have heard about similar efforts that already exist. Scivee has been around for a few years now. It seems to be focussed on researchers explaining and promoting their research, as well as teaching materials.

JoVE publishes videos of experimental procedures and protocols on in the biological and life sciences. The videos are citable and act as a fantastic resource for researchers. However, it only covers methods of research, as opposed to raw research findings.

figshare offers researchers to easily share their research videos to improve the transparency of their research. figshare also allows users to upload their figures, datasets and any other research outputs they may have.

We'd love to hear your thoughts on this and any ways in which we can make this service more useful to you. You can either comment below, email us at info@figshare.com or via twitter, facebook or google+.

Today see's the launch of new figshare site, built completely from scratch with the needs of researchers always coming first. This is a new clean site to be developed with new features and improved functionality in the coming months.

The support from Digital Science has enabled figshare to grow from a proof of concept idea into a real solution for researchers looking to get credit for all of their work. As the UK government commits to transparency and open access to publicly funded data, figshare will continue to allign itself to the best interests of the researchers whilst also nudging users towards the benefits for both themselves and the scientific community of publishing all of their research outputs.

The new site offers dramatically reduces upload time to mere seconds for figures, images, and other data sources, providing a citable, searchable endpoint for researchers. figshare offers unlimited storage space for data that is made publicly available on the site, and as of today is also offering 1 GB of free storage space for users looking for a secure, private area to store their research. Users of the new site will maintain full control over the management of their research whilst benefiting from global access, version control and secure backups in the cloud.

The site will be continually developed with new features and enhancements coming thick and fast. Our immediate objectives include collaborative work spaces.

As with everything figshare, please let us know your thoughts. We've got this far by listening to the feedback of users and we take every suggestion on board as we develop the site further.

This is cross-posted on the DCC blog here, by Kirsty Pitkin.

FigShare will be at the IDCC Conference in Bristol, December 5th-7thth 2011. Please come and say hi.

In the third of our preview posts, Mark Hahnel from FigShare, Digital Science, gives us his perspectives on the issues we hope to address during the rapidly approaching 7th International Digital Curation Conference...

You will be discussing the issues associated with giving researchers credit for their research data in your presentation at IDCC11. Are there any specific messages you hope people will take away from your talk?

In terms of open research data, the landscape is changing, but we all have a role to play if we want to speed up the cultural change. The progression of science is more efficient if all of the research outputs are available to the public for reuse and scrutiny.

Many people claim to have a stake in this research when it is published but few are keen to take responsibility for the large amount of research outputs that are not published and therefore maintained, but are reusable. The global scientific community has a responsibility to improve the efficiency of scholarly communications.

Lots of people argue for open data but far fewer practice what they preach. What do you think is needed to encourage more data sharing?

'Credit'. Researchers need to get credit for making all of their research objects available. This credit can be defined as career/profile enhancing rewards. To date, these career enhancing rewards are limited to the 'impact factor'. This is a great form of credit, but it is not the only one and now we can offer more forms of credit for more research outputs, why aren't we?

Case studies can help. If you, or your repository has a success story of some description then it should be shared. We need to be sharing these stories, building up a catalogue of real life examples where researchers have actually received this 'credit'.

How do you think we can encourage 'unexpected' reuse of data - that is, use by communities other than those who originally collected the data?

I feel there are two things we can be doing better here: improve discoverability of research objects, and better linking of data based on user descriptions, tagging etc.

By linking cross-disciplinary data and offering browsing researchers 'similar research' based on metadata, as sites like YouTube do, new relationships and collaborations can be forged. These are unlikely to come about if we continue digesting and filtering scientific research as we do now.

PDF is a problem. It is nigh on impossible to search for specific figures on google when they are locked away inside PDFs which are not machine readable. This means that all of the content in a traditionally published scientific paper is largely un-discoverable through the one sentence summary that is the paper title.

This can be improved on. Google scholar is helping, but there is so much more that can be done to make research outputs more discoverable and thus help researchers find exactly what they are looking for.

We usually see funders, data creators, universities and data users as the typical set of stakeholders for data. Would you add any to that list?

Government.

PubMed Central (PMC) is a free archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. In keeping with National Library of Medicine (NLM)'s legislative mandate to collect and preserve the biomedical literature, PMC serves as a digital counterpart to NLM's extensive print journal collection.

This legislative mandate infers that biomedical literature is the sole scholarly output of government funded research. This is not true. If your research is public funded, the public should have access where appropriate.

Which stakeholders do you think can do the most to promote a culture of wider reuse of data?

The reuse is not the problem, the access is the problem. If it is available online, researchers will find it and will reuse it. All can and will play a role. However, I feel action by the funders is the most efficient way to make this happen.

We need the content creators to forcibly change the way in which they manage their research outputs. In order to be a successful researcher, you must jump through several criteria hoops in order to secure funding.

The funders decide what these criteria should be and to date, the vast majority do not require good data management practices that can in turn promote reuse.

Which research data management projects do you think will be the ones to watch?

Other than FigShare, there are a few interesting projects that have sprung up in the last six months out of the 'altmetrics' movement. Notably, altmetric.com and total-impact.org. Researchers want to see exactly what people are saying about their data and where. These tools show that this data is trackable using existing technology. API's for research metrics and even individual datasets will allow greater use by a greater range of people.

A large number of researchers, including myself, are forced to become egomaniacs when it comes to research, self promotion and career advancement. The current funding model requires that researchers 'sell' the quality and significance of their research, by publishing in select journals solely because of their impact factor. By measuring the impact in several ways, researchers can boast about the reach of their work in a more detailed manner. This is also good for funders, who can assess how successful each grant has been based on a more detailed analysis.

If there was one change that you could make to improve research data management practice, what would it be?

Correct the uneducated in one fell-swoop. I have had many conversations with researchers who suggest that they would make their data available but their funder or institution forbids them from doing this. Upon further investigation, I have found that every single individual was misinformed or making incorrect assumptions, and in every single example they were wrong.

If I could make one change, it would be to force researchers to make all of their research outputs available in a timely manner, where appropriate. On a more realistic level, I would like funders, institutions and PIs to make researchers aware of their rights and responsibilities when it comes to data management, ideally on day one of a PhD, so this confusion never gets a chance to set in.

You may be also interested in previous interviews from this series with Ewan McIntosh and David Lynn.

As well as the developing a new re-built from scratch site, in the coming months FigShare will be presenting at a few conferences.

If you are at any of these conferences, please drop by and say hello, feedback, discussion and questions are always welcomed.

7th International Digital Curation Conference "Public? Private? Personal? navigating the open data landscape" 5 - 7 December 2011 Marriott Royal Hotel, Bristol, UK

"Digital curation manages, maintains, preserves, and adds value to digital information throughout its lifecycle, reducing threats to long-term value, mitigating the risk of digital obsolescence and enhancing usefulness for research and scholarship.

IDCC brings together those who create information, those who curate and manage it, those who use it and those who research and teach about curation processes."

Science Online 2012 ScienceOnline2012 is the sixth annual international meeting on science and the Web.

Every January since 2007, the Research Triangle area of North Carolina has hosted scientists, students, educators, physicians, journalists, librarians, bloggers, programmers and others interested in the way the World Wide Web is changing the way science is communicated, taught and done.

ScienceOnline2012 - #scio12 across social media - will take place January 19-21, 2012 on the campus of N.C. State University, with some 450 participants.

"Dealing with Data

On the importance of data publication, data management, and discovery in the sciences - from the tools that serve as enablers (ChemSpider, FigShare) to the broader issues affecting how we approach data-driven science and sharing of information (access, ownership, social stigma). This session will build upon Open Data sessions of the past, and look at how we can make better use of information to not only surface new insights, but do better science, as well as reward contributions in a way that reflects the move to digital."

Strata Making Data Work February 28-March 1, 2012 Santa Clara, CA

It's Not "Junk" [Data] Anymore

"In a research environment, under the current operating system, most data and figures collected or generated during your work is lost, intentionally tossed aside or classified as "junk", or at worst trapped in silos or locked behind embargo periods. This stifles and limits scientific research at its core, making it much more difficult to validate experiments, reproduce experiments or even stumble upon new breakthroughs that may be buried in your null results.

Changing this reality not only takes the right tools and technology to store, sift and publish data, but also a shift in the way we think of and value data as a scientific contribution in the research process. In the digital age, we're not bound by the physical limitations of analog medium such as the traditional scientific journal or research paper, nor should our data be locked into understandings based off that medium.

This session will look at the socio-cultural context of data science in the research environment, specifically at the importance of publishing negative results through tools like FigShare - an open data project that fosters data publication, not only for supplementary information tied to publication, but all of the back end information needed to reproduce and validate the work, as well as the negative results. We'll hear about the broader cultural shift needed in how we incentivise better practices in the lab and how companies like Digital Science are working to use technology to push those levers to address the social issue. The session will also include a look at the real-world implications in clinical research and medicine from Ben Goldacre, an epidemiologist who has been looking at not only the ethical consequences but issues in efficacy and validation."

Repository Fringe was set in Edinburgh in August. All the videos of the other talks can be seen here, and a great review of preceedings from McDawg can be seen here.

We are developing away here at FigShare.

As of last month's funding injection from Digital Science, the development has really kicked up a notch. For those who missed it:

"Digital Science's relationship with FigShare represents the first of its kind in the company's history: a community-based, open science project that will retain its autonomy whilst receiving support from the division."

While the progress of FigShare has been steady since it's arrival in March, the team has now grown and we are creating a custom framework complete with new design in the coming months (apparently some people think the current colour schema is a bit bright/eye burning). The main reason for moving to custom is because the mediawiki platform on which FigShare is currently based, is being used for reasons in which it was not intended to. Like other science web-based projects such as Mendeley, FigShare started life as a prototype to fix a problem that we as scientific researchers were having. As with many of the problems a researcher faces, it soon transpires that they are not the only one hence the expansion of FigShare into a tool which aims to help any researcher from any scientific discipline better manage their research objects. Essentially we want to make it so that researchers can store all of their research objects, no matter what format in a one click upload, or drag and drop manner and make it immediately citable and sharable.

So why are we telling you this? Well for one, to let you know that a lack of apparent development is actually being over-compensated for by an exponential growth in the level of development going on. But also to let you know that your opinions on how #openscience should best be carried, out are implementable at this stage! We have been listening to the repository community in the UK and will be implementing SWORD functionality in order to improve the level of crosstalk between scientific repositories. As usual, we'd love to hear your thought on what you think is needed for a cloud hosted scientific research repository. You can let us know your thoughts directly via twitter or facebook, or email us at mark@figshare.com.

Basically, this post aims to let users know that there is a loooot going on behind the scenes and a new FigShare will be with you soon. We're aiming to make it stupidly simple to upload, store, manage and share your research data in a open manner. In other words, 'watch this space'.....

It is with great pleasure that I can announce that the FigShare is collaborating with Digital Science. Digital Science provides software and information to support researchers and research administrators in their everyday work, with the ultimate aim of making science more productive through the use of technology.

As part of this agreement, FigShare remains an open independent organisation and is in no part owned by Digital Science. The support from Digital Science will help FigShare develop and expand on it's current range of features in order to help scientist manage their data in an easily searchable, sharable and citable manner.

Here's what Timo Hannay, Managing Director has to say about FigShare and open science:

"We're delighted to welcome Mark to our team," said Timo Hannay, Managing Director of Digital Science. "As soon as we spoke with him about FigShare, it became apparent that this was a project worthy of our support, but also that a traditional commercial investment wouldn't have been appropriate. We look forward to working with Mark to learn about how best to enable openness in science, and to build FigShare into a central community resource."

The Digital Science team includes a wide range of highly skilled programmers, developers and scientists, all with the common goal of making life easier for researchers. Since the beta release in March, the rate of development has been limited by a lack of manpower. This collaborative effort means that FigShare can move faster towards the aim of becoming and essential tool for all researchers.

You can read more about this in the press release here. As always, feedback and comments are always welcome. You can leave comments here, or get in touch directly by e-mailing mark@figshare.com or @figshare on twitter.