Figshare links your desktop to the cloud

Yesterday saw the launch of the first figshare desktop uploader. The first release of the desktop uploader is a beta version and is only Windows supported, but versions for other operating systems will be coming soon.

It’s a very simple app that allows resumable uploads to your private ‘My Data’ section of figshare, where you can add some metadata and make your research outputs sharable, citable and discoverable, or keep it private. You can read more about the types of research outputs you can upload to figshare here.

The private section of figshare gives you 1GB of storage space at no cost, so that you can access your research outputs in a secure manner from any computer in the world.

The desktop uploader is a lightweight app that sits on your desktop and allows you to drag in your research outputs, where you can then track their progress as they are uploaded to the cloud. You can upload many files at once and the uploader supports resumable uploads. This means if your internet connection drops, you don’t need to start the uploads again.

This adds to the ever-growing collection of tools that you can use to help better manage your research outputs via figshare. You can read more about the desktop uploader features, as well as the figshare API and badges on the tools page. The developments have been coming thick and fast recently. Here is a couple more of the improvements from last week:

Reserve DOIs

A common use case for figshare
is for users to upload research outputs that don’t fit into traditional publications, which they then link to in the reference list of the said journal article. However, some users suggested that they often did not want to make the research output on figshare live until the paper was published. For this reason, we have added a new feature which lets you see the complete citation for all of your private objects, including the DOI. This DOI is not active, just reserved.

This means that you can include this reference in articles in the reference list, without having to make the research output publicly available on figshare until the paper goes live. The ‘Reserve citation’ link can be found at the bottom of each expanded article in ‘My Data’.

Presentations section

As time has gone on, we have seen researchers wanting to get credit for an ever growing diverse amount of research outputs. The most recent of these is presentations. So today we are adding a presentations type to the repertoire.

Complementing this nicely is the new custom built document viewer to be rolled out across all relevant articles very soon. This handles both papers viewing and presentation slides. There are lots of subtle improvements in the design that you will also notice, including batch edit and a more simple way to create filesets. Authors and tags can now be dragged and dropped into the order of your choice.

You can find out more about the different research output formats on the ‘types’ page. We are also looking into a code/software type. The problem we are trying to get our head around is licensing as there seems to be a lot of discrepancies in the licenses by which people share their code. Of course any code or software that you upload to figshare
at the moment we are happy to make citable for you and sharable under a CC-BY license.

As always, feedback, comments, suggestions and ideas are welcomed. Please get in touch with the figshare team at info@figshare.com or via twitter, facebook or google+.