Figshare announces new partnership with the Public Library of Science

figshare, a community-driven open data project, today announced a new partnership with the Public Library of Science (PLOS) to aid the visualisation of different types of data across the PLOS journals and make the data more widely accessible. figshare will host the supplemental data for all seven PLOS journals, as well as provide a widget that will enable PLOS users to view data in the articles in the browser alongside the content. figshare was founded by Mark Hahnel, and is part of the Digital Science portfolio.

“PLOS believes in making data as visible and useful as possible,” said Kristen Ratan, Chief Publishing and Product Officer at PLOS. “Partnering with figshare is an important step in increasing the accessibility of the data associated with our research articles.”

The growing diversity of research outputs (ie., data, figures, videos, code) has led to exploration by service providers and, more importantly, publishers into ways of incorporating different file types into research articles, making for a more complete record. An early example of this can be seen in Elsevier’s article of the future project. figshare is working with publishers to help them improve the submission process for data and other research products, at a time when there is increased pressure to include other components necessary to reproduce an experiment in the journal article.

This partnership illustrates PLOS’ continued innovation in the academic publishing space, with a focus on catering to the needs of their authors and evolving publishing paradigms. The new functionality on PLOS also allows the files to be discovered through a portal on figshare which will go live in the coming weeks, enhancing the discoverability of the data and providing each submission with its own Digital Object Identifier (DOI) so it can be cited. The partnership will also help PLOS fulfil the growing requests from funders for academics to make all of their research outputs available, as all data on Figshare is openly licensed under CC-BY (if copyright applies) or made available under CC0.

“We are delighted to be partnering with PLOS on this project, a publisher with a similar ethos,” said Mark Hahnel, founder of figshare. “We hope this will better enable researchers to do more with the data behind the papers, improving the transparency of the research and aid reproducibility.”

It has been a busy week for figshare, who also recently announced their new figshare Advisors programme. The advisor scheme rewards Figshare users who encourage their colleagues to use figshare for both their private cloud based management of research outputs and the ability to get credit for all of their research.

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