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Your research should be in a repository

Your

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+.

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