Figshare Looks Back Through the Years

On 7th December 2020, Digital Science celebrates its official tenth birthday (though it existed as “Project Babbage” for more than a year before it was launched publicly). To mark the occasion, we will be releasing a few birthday posts over the course of the year.

When Figshare’s founder, Mark Hahnel, had nowhere to make his datasets publicly available, through frustration he built his own tool, Figshare. Now, millions have made their data open too. In reflecting on the past ten years Mark commented:

“At the start of the 2010s, reproducibility and replicability of research were high on the agenda for a lot of folks involved in academia. Fast forward 10 years and open data mandates from funders have risen as one of the important stepping stones to achieve that goal.

The rise of open research data mandates and FAIR data principles has caused an exponential uptake in the numbers of academics sharing their data through Figshare. Matching this is the hockey stick growth curve of citations to datasets. We are now on the precipice of truly being able to build on the research that has gone before, going a long way to not only solving the reproducibility problem, but also making academia more efficient.”

Watch our short video celebrating the achievements of Figshare here:

Read Figshare’s latest report on the State of Open Data here: