This document is an outline of the features and functionality of Figshare for Institutions that are most commonly marketed by institutions. Pick and choose which features are most valuable to your researchers and faculty to build your own promotional material. Please feel free to reuse or edit any of the text below as necessary in flyers, posters, presentations, banners, and more.
Figshare has a robust API for programmatically moving content into and out of Figshare. Documentation for the API is available at https://docs.figshare.com/. Figshare also has an FTP upload option perfect for large files or many files where the browser is not suitable. Documentation for the FTP uploader is available here.
If you’re a research center, project, department, or lab, you can have a branded space in our institutional instance of Figshare. You’ll have your own landing page and URL and can use your group’s branding to showcase research outputs from your group.
Collaborate with researchers inside and outside of your institution using Figshare projects. Project members can upload files, comment on items, and work collaboratively. Members of projects can either be collaborators — where they can upload files themselves and leave comments — or viewers — where they can only view items in the project. Project owners can invite people from outside their institution to collaborate on a project. They’re private until the owner of the owner of the project chooses to make the project publicly available. More information on projects is available here.
Users can create collections of items they’ve uploaded to Figshare or items that others have uploaded. Collections are ways of grouping items together under a single theme, with Collections themselves getting DOIs. Create versions of Collections and use them to create a portfolio showcase of your research.
Every item that is published on Figshare is assigned a persistent, citable DOI or handle. If your item has been cited, Figshare will track citations automatically on the public page for your item. Click on the citation counter to see exactly where your item has been cited.
Several funders require research data to be made openly and freely available. Some of those funders and their mandates are listed below:
UK Research and Innovation (UKRI):
https://www.ukri.org/files/legacy/documents/concordatonopenresearchdata-pdf/
Horizon 2020:
US Funders:
http://datasharing.sparcopen.org/data
Check whether a funder mandates open access using Jisc’s Sherpa Juliet: https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet/.
Some institutions may have policies around storing and/or sharing research outputs. Some examples include:
Figshare integrates with a number of other applications, including GitHub, ORCiD, labfolder, Open Science Framework, Binder, and more. A full list of integrations and documentation is available at https://knowledge.figshare.com/apps.
When uploading research outputs to Figshare, you can create a link between your publication and your outputs on Figshare. In the item upload form under Resource Title and Resource DOI, add the title of your publication in the Resource Title field and the DOI of your publication in the Resource DOI field. When your item is published, a link to your publication will appear on the public page for your item.
Usage metrics are automatically tracked on public Figshare pages to ensure uploaders and administrators have an understanding of an item’s reuse and impact. Views, downloads, citations, and Altmetrics are tracked and kept updated.
You can use the private link functionality to store outputs for blind peer review in your instance of Figshare. Just upload the file(s), fill in the metadata, and select ‘Generate a private link’ at the top of the edit item page. Sharing this with reviewers will remove author and institutional details, making it suitable for blind and double-blind peer review.
Research outputs on Figshare should be as open as possible and as closed as necessary. There are conditions and restrictions you can place on the access of your data (some features are dependent on whether your institution has configured them or not. These are marked with an asterisk):
Figshare is a cloud-based platform that allows you to store your research outputs in a secure place accessible at any time, whether you’re on campus or elsewhere. If your institution uses Figshare-provided Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 storage, Amazon S3 stores multiple, redundant copies of your information so you don’t have to worry about ever losing your master copy. AWS utilises an end-to-end approach to secure and harden its infrastructure, including physical, operational, and software measures and provides authentication mechanisms to ensure that data is kept secure from unauthorised access.
Figshare also does daily backups of the metadata, and weekly snapshots of the entire data system, including an encrypted one of the S3 file store. Figshare also uses MD5 checksums when storing a file, which are checked against the file regularly to ensure the file is intact. Figshare is also ISO27001 certified.
If implemented by your institution, you will be able to sign in to your institutional instance of Figshare using your institution’s single sign-on authentication, meaning you don’t have to remember another username and password.
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