Data Publishing and Curation Support: From Fish Fossils to Mouse Lemurs

In April, Figshare announced the launch of a new tool that enables authors to share their research outputs more efficiently during the publishing process. Springer Nature were the first publisher to pilot this tool and their authors, and authors of 64 BMC journals*, can now submit more of their research outputs via a data submission portal powered by Figshare.

Springer Nature worked with Figshare to build this customised data submission portal, reducing the amount of information authors must complete to share data supporting their publication — and they plan to refine and improve the portal in response to feedback during this Data Support Services pilot.

Today, we are seeing the first publications at Springer Nature where authors have opted, during manuscript submission and peer review, to take advantage of this new tool and to make their data more discoverable. This week these first publications have be published in Nature, and BMC Ecology, with their supporting data being made openly available and accessible through the Springer Nature portal on Figshare.

Iain Hrynaszkiewicz, Head of Data Publishing at Springer Nature said:

“The research published in Nature represents a significant advance in our understanding of fish evolution; and the research in BMC Ecology provides evidence for the influence of hormones on survival rates of primates. These two articles highlight the diverse needs of data publishing and curation support, from multi-gigabyte computed tomography (CT) images, in the Nature article, to Excel spreadsheets for Dr Josué Hasina Rakotoniaina’s experiments involving mouse lemurs.” 

Figshare supports the preview of numerous files and here’s a beautiful example of Dr Giles’ fish fossil 3D rotating CT images.

CT scan data and surface files from middle Triassic fossil scanilepiform fish

More information on Springer Nature Data Support Services is here.

*64 BMC journals