Figshare gets startup of the week in Wired

Congratulations to team Figshare, who have bagged startup of the week in Wired!

Including a detailed Q&A with Figshare’s founder Mark Hahnel, the article looks at how and why Figshare started, including their unique selling points:

Figshare is the only platform that allows researchers to upload any academic file — images, videos, datasets, posters, presentations, papers, theses or even software code. Once the file is uploaded we visualise it within the browser, this is important to allow researchers to view files quickly and without the need of third party software. We give every uploaded file a unique persistent link called a digital object identifier (DOI). This is the gold standard of referencing in academia and ensures that everything on Figshare is citable in the long term.

The piece also delves into the next steps for open access, looking at the future of Figshare:

For us the Shangri-La is a world where a group of researchers generate new information based on new hypotheses, make it available on Figshare and then others pull together the combined world’s knowledge to look for new patterns and discoveries that the original authors had not thought to look for. These data scientists will need tools, which we have already made available on our open API. I’d love to see more of these tools helping more people make more discoveries, more often.

You can read the full article in all its glory here.