Here at figshare, we appreciate that the name can sometime be misleading. It literally means the sharing of figures, nothing to do with the fruit. Last weekend at scifoo, this topic of conversation came up with Michael Nielsen, who wondered if people may just think that we host static images.

We believe the future of academic publishing involves the raw outputs of the research, whether that is a video, dataset, pdf or any other file type you can think of. In this sense the ‘figure’ represents a unit of research, which bring us to the next question we get asked a lot:

This is easy, there are no rules. figshare encourages the sharing of all research outputs that you feel may have some value for someone. Below are some examples of what researchers have shared, on figshare. As usual, the community has come up with most of these ideas and the list continues to grow. Please feel free to add to it with your research outputs:

...and many more.

It was great to see strong recommendations in this area last week in a Joint Statement from DataCite, the International Association of STM Publishers, and CrossRef on the Linkability and Citability of Research Data:

”CrossRef encourages publishers to use DataCite DOIs to link to data sets referenced in the published literature”

As a member of DataCite, figshare also encourages researchers to cite datasets in this way. To cite research on figshare you can find the text below the file on each article page. This can be copied, or exported to Endnote, RefMan and Mendeley using the links in the sidebar.

We will continue to evolve based on user feedback. Today we enabled the visualisation of PDB files in the browser for all the chemists out there. If you have any specific requests, please let us know. As always, feedback, comments, suggestions and ideas are welcomed. If you represent a publisher and would like to hear more about our offerings for publishers, please get in touch at info@figshare.com or via twitter, facebook or google+.

Comments (0)

You must be logged in to post comments.

Other articles

• figshare ORCID integration
• How will Projects help figshare?
• figshare Mac and Linux Desktop Uploa ...
• Challenging the Science Publishing " ...
• Rigour And Openness in 21st Century ...
• Open Access Science ASAP!
• UKSG - Connecting The Knowledge Comm ...
• figshare partners with Nature on the ...
• Nature Special on The future of publ ...
• Beyond The PDF 2 - Resources and Hig ...