Digital Science supports open data project FigShare

Mark Hahnel has joined to the Research Tools team of Digital Science to carry on his work developing FigShare, a service that enables researchers to publish and share their data.

Hahnel began work on FigShare while he was a PhD student at Imperial College, UK because he was frustrated with the duplication and waste in research due to inadequate data openness and visibility. To help address this challenge, the service allows researchers to publish their data in a citable, searchable and sharable manner. The data can come in the form of individual figures, datasets or video files and users are encouraged to share their negative data and unpublished results too. All data is persistently stored online under the most liberal Creative Commons licence, waiving copyright where possible. This allows scientists to access and share the information from anywhere in the world with minimal friction.

As product development manager for FigShare, Hahnel will continue to work on the service as an independent project, supported by Digital Science.

'By working with Digital Science, FigShare is receiving a greater level of support to achieve the functionality needed to make it useful to all researchers. The aim is to make the storage and dissemination of research data effortless, in terms of both simplicity and time,' explained Hahnel.

Digital Science's relationship with FigShare represents the company's first community-based, open-science project that will retain its autonomy whilst receiving support from the division.