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Mission Statement & Core Beliefs

At figshare, we have a vision to change the face of academic publishing with the improved dissemination and discoverability of all scholarly research and content. Since day 1, we have always focussed on making use of new technologies such as cloud hosting and new browser functionality to better aid researchers, publishers and institutions in their attempts to better manage and disseminate academic research.

Born out of frustrations within the academic system, the figshare team are firm believers in the power of open access to knowledge. At the same time, we fully understand that the changing landscape of academic publishing is in a transition stage and academic career progression is largely dependent on pre-web concepts. In order to empower modern day researchers, publishers and institutions, we acknowledge that simple UIs and incentives are necessary for a successful partnership.

All content hosted on figshare infrastructure can be downloaded by anyone, with no need to log in. The content can also be mass downloaded or mined using the figshare API, also available to anyone at docs.figshare.com

We believe in a future where academics are appropriately rewarded for all aspects of their careers. We are pushing for a world where academics can build on top of the cumulative research of those who have gone before. For this we believe that all content and associated metadata should be interpretable by man and machine alike. We will continue to utilise technology and workflow processes, such as the agile methodology currently implemented, in order to make responsible data management and dissemination a natural and unobtrusive part of the research life-cycle.

Some of figshare’s Core Beliefs:

  • Academic research outputs should be as open as possible, as closed as necessary
  • Academic research outputs should never be behind a paywall
  • Academic research outputs should be human and machine readable/query-able
  • Academic infrastructure should be interchangeable
  • Academic researchers should never have to put the same information into multiple systems at the same institution
  • Identifiers for everything
  • The impact of research is independent of where it is published and what type of output it is

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