Publishing your Datasets in the NIH Figshare Instance: An Introduction for Biomedical Researchers

As part of the NIH ​Strategic Plan for Data Science (https://datascience.nih.gov/strategicplan)​, the NIH is committed to making datasets resulting from NIH investigator publications more accessible. Researchers sometimes find themselves with a requirement to share data, but cannot identify a specific repository to use. When researchers don’t have a subject-specific repository relevant to their work, a generalist repository can be an appropriate place to store their data. The NIH Figshare instance is one example of a generalist repository.

If you are an NIH-funded researcher, or in a lab that has NIH funding, join us for this webinar to learn how you can quickly and easily share the products of your research including datasets, code, and multimedia files in order to increase the impact of your work.

Data submitted to the NIH Figshare instance is reviewed by an expert on the Figshare team for file verification and description completeness. One goal of this review is to maximize the discoverability and reusability of the item by ensuring that the data and metadata are aligned with the FAIR principles (https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/) - findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable.

The NIH Figshare instance provides NIH-funded researchers the following:

● The ability to self-publish any data type in any file format

● All data assigned a citable NIH Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

● All data associated with a license

● Ability to link grant information to published data

● Ability to embargo data

● Open access to all published data

● Data indexed in Google and discoverable across search engines

● Usage metrics – including views, downloads, citations, and Altmetrics – tracked openly