Figshare, a portfolio company of Digital Science – a technology company serving the needs of scientific research, has announced the launch of Figshare for Institutions, a simple and cost-effective software solution for academic and higher education establishments to both securely host and make publicly available its academic research outputs. Figshare allows academic institutions to publish, share and get credit for their research data, hosting videos, datasets, posters, figures and papers in a cost-effective way.
Institutions can choose to make as little or as much of its research publicly available as its funding mandates require, ensuring that they can take control of all their research outputs – to make them citable, searchable and discoverable. Academic publishers such as Nature, PLOS and F1000 are currently using Figshare to bring their published articles to life – either by making the entire supplementary article data open to their readers or by providing the article content.
With new funder mandates requiring institutions to provide self-archiving and to make increasing amounts of their research outputs publicly available, Figshare allows institutions to easily aggregate research at both the departmental and institutional level, automatically providing a self-populating institutional repository with reporting capabilities. Researchers can quickly upload their data and easily retrieve research and data with simple file curation. These research outputs are then just one click away from being made openly and persistently available if mandated by the institutional funder. The uploaded research is also citable and trackable via a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and detailed reporting metrics are available for the institution, to track the interest in its publicly available research.
All publicly available outputs are citable and trackable with a unique DOI. The impact of these objects can then be tracked and Figshare offers institutions cumulative metrics, such as citations and downloads, as well as newer measures such as altmetrics. Figshare and the CLOCKSS Archive have partnered to preserve the content publically available on Figshare in CLOCKSS's geographically and geopolitically distributed network of redundant archive nodes, located at 12 major research libraries around the world.
