Figshare Launches Premium Subscription With Private Collaborative Spaces

Figshare Ltd. an online repository for academic researchers to host, publish and share all their research, launched Figshare Premium – offering users up to 20GB of private online storage space and collaborative spaces for up to 20 research collaborators.

Researchers can store and, if they choose to do so, share data, video, datasets, posters, figures and papers in a secure way. Within these collaborative spaces is the functionality to add notes or comments to keep track of progress, protocols and ideas.

“The greater flexibility and enhanced functionality gives researchers better control of their data and makes collaborating with colleagues much easier,” said Mark Hahnel, founder, Figshare. “Academics can struggle to organise their research outputs, as I once did. Figshare offers a tried and tested environment which can help them manage important outputs. The move to offer a Premium service is a significant step for Figshare and demonstrates how valued it has become to its quickly growing group of users.”

Three levels of Figshare Premium available which offer:

• Up to 20GB of private storage plus unlimited public space.

• More private collaborative spaces with up to 20 collaborators.

• Access-controlled team sharing and collaborative spaces with the ability to add notes and comments to files.

• Management and monitoring of all research outputs.

• All research outputs can be made citable, visualisable, embeddable and trackable with one click.

Persistent and trackable:
All publicly available outputs are citable and trackable with a unique DOI. The impact of these objects can then be tracked using metrics, such as citations and downloads, as well as newer measures such as altmetrics. The business 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 research libraries around the world.

Controlled access:
Figshare is hosted using AWS to ensure high level of security and stability for research data. Amazon S4 stores multiple redundant copies of information so you don’t have to worry about losing your master copy. The persistence of all the files hosted 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 located and shared.