Introducing Projects – Digital Science’s first home-grown tool

Digital Science is proud to announce the launch of its very own home-grown software tool – Projects.

Projects is a safe, simple and structured way for scientific researchers to organise their research outputs. It helps to keep track of experiments, save time and get ahead with research.

The academic research community has repeatedly told us that their information tools are inadequate, making it hard to organise their data files effectively. This unmet need has been the driving force behind the development of Projects.

“A lot of the current problems in research data management stem back to the way in which academics organise the outputs of their research. There is rarely consistency within research groups, let alone between groups, meaning other researchers cannot find files when trying to look through the research of previous researchers”, says Mark Hahnel, Product Owner of Projects and Founder of figshare.

We try to be agile with our tools at Digital Science and we want people to start benefiting from using Projects as soon as possible, so we’ve released it on Mac only to begin with. We’ll be releasing Windows and Linux versions as fast as we can, along with other features including sharing, collaboration and integration with other research tools.

Using Projects you can:

• View a unique chronological visual timeline of your research activity and more easily find important files
• Manually or automatically take “snapshots” of your work to seamlessly restore previous versions of files
• Store your data files in a simple organised way within a handy desktop drive, which can be easily shared or synchronised with remote backup services
• Flag, star and take notes on your data files to distinguish important files and to optimise search results

This is just the start. We have plans to:

• Link to open access repositories, such as figshare, to ensure every scientific researcher gains credit for ‘all’ their research 
• Make remote backups easier for an even greater peace of mind
• Make it easier to share and collaborate with others on projects and experiments

So get involved – download Projects today and get a free 30-day trial. As always, we greatly appreciate your feedback so please get in touch via projects.ac