Thursday 1 March 2012

figshare: sharing your scientific results

Figshare is intended to be the place for all researcher to share its supplementary data or prepublication data so it can be reviewed. Also would be a way of sharing data between groups when working in large interdisciplinary and international multigroup projects.

http://figshare.com/

The only caveats that I see are:

- Only 1  GB of free space. This is nothing when talking about images and data for a lab. It is OK to pay for your own backup , but if this initiative is successful and people start to use it for backing their papers, you would like to have all the data there for long time. Who is going to pay for keep the research data when you change lab or your are forced to leave remunerated science?

- I hope they have easy ways of export your data and metadata generated so all the effort and time used in creating this sceintific corpus in the web can be kept safe and replicated if the site disappear

This site has the support from Nature’s sister company, Digital Science.


blog entries about figshare:

http://blog.f1000.com/2012/01/17/figshare-a-carrot-for-sharing/
http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj-journals-development-blog/2012/02/17/figshare-striving-for-greater-efficiency-in-scientific-research/