Showcasing the VIVO Conference Outputs with Figshare

The recent launch of Figshare for Institutions will see the complete Figshare codebase move over to a much more flexible system. This means those who use Figshare can make use of new functionality such as ‘embargos’ and ‘collections’. To date, Figshare have focussed their features on keeping life simple for academics, whilst giving both end users and institutions complete control over their files. They have also supported publishers in their need for new infrastructure to host an ever diversifying and growing number of research outputs. The new codebase however, allows a lot more flexibility to provide solutions to any party looking to better manage and disseminate academic content.

The first of these areas is academic conferences. The Figshare team attended the recent VIVO conference in Boston and took the opportunity to discuss a potential portal with Mike Conlon (VIVO Project Lead) and Kristi Holmes (VIVO15 Conference Chair). As a tribute to the high regard Figshare and the entire Digital Science portfolio holds for the VIVO community, Figshare decided to pilot the new portals as a way to manage and expose the products of the conference.

Conferences are a fantastic source of academic outputs, from forward thinking abstracts to cutting edge research in posters. As well as this, outputs can also include presentations and even videos of the talks.  For the most part, this is captured on conference websites which aren’t necessarily visited much after the conference itself. By supporting the persistent storage of these outputs, conferences can have useful records of all of the outputs presented. As with all public Figshare outputs, the files are previewable in the browser and everything is persistent and citable with a DOI.

Figshare are continuing to collect content for this year’s highly successful VIVO conference and if you have posters, presentations, or anything associated, you can email them to s.porter@digital-science.com . In the meantime, you can check their progress with the VIVO 2015 portal here!

The new portal designs mean that the logo and branding can be matched up with the year’s theme or location. The portal has lots of filters so conference organisers can see which are the most popular posters and presentations, while making all of the content citable. Going forward, preserving a copy of record of the annual conference will be easy. Each year a new filter and landing page can be added so that each annual conference can have its own persistent record.

If you are running an academic conference and would be interested in piloting the new functionality, or if you have any other interesting use cases for the new portals, do reach out to Figshare and let them know. Alternatively, if you would like to hear more about how Figshare can satisfy funder mandates on open data, or to see how ‘Figshare for Institutions’ could be a good fit at your University or College, get in touch via info@figshare.com or via twitter, facebook or google+.