LONDON and BOSTON, September 5, 2013 /PRNewswire/ --

Reputation-enhancing, cost-efficient solution to fulfill mandates to self-archive and share research data

Figshare today announces 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 Nature, PLOS and F1000 currently trust 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.

Mark Hahnel, founder of Figshare explains, "Academics can struggle to organise their research outputs, as I once did. Figshare for Institutions integrates into their existing workflow so that their data management requirements are complied with subconsciously. The institutions also benefit by seeing the full reputational impact of all of the research they generate, a huge step up from the silo-ed system that exists within many research organisations at the moment."

Included: 

• Large amounts of secure, private storage plus unlimited public space.
• Simple, institution-wide management and monitoring of all research outputs for institution staff with subject categorisation per department.
• Access-controlled team sharing and collaborative spaces with the ability to add notes and comments to files.
• An institutional dashboard with detailed metrics on the impact of publicly available data.
• All research outputs can be made citable, visualisable, embeddable and trackable with one click.
• The ability to push research to any internal repository.
• Institution-wide compliance with open data requirements of funding bodies.
• Dedicated support team.

Persistent and trackable:

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.

Secure and controlled access:

Figshare is hosted using Amazon Web Services to ensure the highest level of security and stability for research data. Amazon S4 stores multiple redundant copies of information so you don't have to worry about ever losing your master copy. The security and persistence of all the files hosted on Figshare makes it easy to prevent plagiarism of the research data held there, as all uploads are time-stamped. The private collaborative spaces feature allows users to keep their research visible only to themselves, or available to specified collaborators or their PI, ensuring that files can be easily located and shared.

For more information, visit http://figshare.com

Follow @figshare on Twitter or Google+ Mark Hahnel for the latest developments.  

About Figshare and Digital Science

Figshare was the brainchild of Mark Hahnel, who whilst studying for his PhD in stem cell biology at Imperial College, London became frustrated at not being able to publish ALL his scientific research. Figshare enables academic researchers to make all of their research outputs available in a citable, sharable and discoverable manner. The platform allows users to upload any file format to be made visualisable in the browser so that figures, datasets, media, papers, posters, presentations and filesets can be disseminated in a way that the current scholarly publishing model does not allow. Figshare is a portfolio company of Digital Science - a technology company serving the needs of scientific research. Operated by Macmillan Science & Education, it offers a range of range of scientific technology and content solutions, from intelligent knowledge discovery tools to software applications for the laboratory and decision support systems for managers. For more information, visit http://figshare.com and http://www.digital-science.com

About Macmillan Science & Education

As part of one of the largest and best known international publishing groups in the world, the new global division of Macmillan Science and Education is characterised by seven high-quality academic, scholarly and educational businesses. The division employs more than 5,000 people, operating in more than 50 countries around the world, supporting scientists, professors, teachers, journalists, editors, writers and entrepreneurs to empower learning and discovery. http://www.learndiscover.com

SOURCE Figshare