The PostDocs Forum

By: Mark Hahnel

Today sees the launch of a new website from figshare which allows you to publish all of your research in seconds. Your data becomes citable, searchable and discoverable – helping you to increase the impact of your research.

figshare grew out of the frustrations of a stem cell researcher, Mark Hahnel, who during his PhD was disappointed with the high percentage of his research objects that would never be seen outside of his research group; Experiments that gave null results, or results that didn’t fit in to the current ‘story’ required for standard article publication in scientific journals. The large datasets or videos which are usually submitted as supplementary material, even if they provide more evidence than the standard graphs and screenshots included in the articles. These files are often printed out into paper form, stuck into labbooks and the digital forms are lost, losing most of the raw data needed to interpret the research.

By providing a way to store all research data in the cloud in a very quick and simple manner, figshare allows researchers to overcome these problems. Up to 1GB of data can be stored privately in any file format for free, and users have unlimited space for publicly available research. Premium accounts for storing large volumes of private data are coming soon, taking advantage of the decreasing costs of storage space in the cloud. The “proof of concept” site has been updated following support from Digital Science, a sister company to Nature Publishing Group.

As Peter Murray-Rust of Cambridge points out, “The primary purpose of publication for most academics is self-advancement”. For this reason, figshare focuses on giving users credit for all of their research. By taking advantage of traditional measures of impact (i.e. the number of citations), as well as new measurements such as altmetrics, researchers get a greater level of information about the impact and reach of their research.

By breaking research publications into their smallest unit, the research becomes more discoverable, as search engines like google index each individual research object title and not a sweeping title for the whole research project, as is the case with journal publications. This public data is then easily searchable and browsable through figshare, with the ability to view the most shared and viewed in each research field. This gives researchers an idea of which research in their field is having the biggest impact in real-time.

The idea of a new model for scientific publishing is nothing new, but by making the process simple and fast, more researchers will see the direct benefits of sharing all research data other than the established increased citation rates. As with all new technology, early adopters tend to reap the greatest benefit. In a research landscape that is becoming increasingly competitive, showing off your research may be the way to distinguish yourself from the masses. It has, after all, been postulated that “the new Einsteins will be scientists who share”!

Mark is fresh out of of academia, having just completed his PhD in stem cell biology at Imperial College London, after studying genetics in both Newcastle and Leeds. He is passionate about open science and the potential it has to revolutionize the research community. For more information about figshare, visit http://figshare.com. You can follow Mark on twitter: @figshare