About us
Figshare is a provider of open research repository infrastructure. Our solutions help organizations and researchers share, showcase and manage their research outputs in a discoverable, citable, reportable and transparent way.
'There’s a good quantity of research that’s been made open that would not have been made open without Figshare. I’m very proud of that fact.'
Dr. Mark Hahnel, VP, Open Research, Digital Science and founder of Figshare
What is Figshare?
Figshare is a provider of repository software.
We support organizations and researchers in meeting the growing demands for research to become open, freer, FAIRer and more connected. Figshare provides the flexibility and control for you to create research management workflows that work for you.
Figshare was founded by Dr Mark Hahnel, originally created as a personal custom solution for the organization and publication of diverse research products generated in support of his PhD in stem cell biology.
Since then, Figshare has grown quickly and now serves scholarly publishers, academic institutions, government agencies, non-profits, research funders and pharmaceutical organizations. We partner with organizations to provide repository infrastructure, but Figshare.com, for individual researchers, remains free to access.
Since our inception, we have been committed to open research and furthering its pursuit. We adhere to our core beliefs through our partnerships with our clients and continued support of global research communities.
There are now over 8 million research outputs that have been made openly available using Figshare. Individual researchers can still use figshare.com freely and a growing number of organizations are choosing us as their repository platform.
Our core beliefs
At Figshare, our work is guided and governed by our core beliefs that were set out at our inception. We're continuously striving to create and support new solutions and workflows that make open, equitable, transparent and trusted research a reality.
- Research outputs should be as open as possible or as closed as necessary
- Research outputs should be human and machine readable/query-able
- Academic infrastructure should be interchangeable
- Researchers shouldn’t have to put the same information into multiple systems at the same institution
- Identifiers for everything
- The impact of research is independent of where it is published and what type of output it is
Serving stakeholders across the research ecosystem
Open research infrastructure
Open Infrastructure refers to the set of technological tools and services that support and enable open science practices. It groups digital platforms and repositories that facilitate the dissemination, preservation, and accessibility of research outputs like publications, data, software, hardware, and more. Open Infrastructure fosters collaboration as well as the adoption of open standards, ensuring the transparency, reusability, reproducibility, and long-term sustainability of scientific research. - CERN
Figshare is a commercial vendor and this means that our code base is not open source, but we are a provider of open research infrastructure. Our tools and services enable open science practices and drive the adoption of open standards.
There are multiple components of Figshare infrastructure that are completely open:
- Figshare.com is free to use for individual researchers, any scholarly research outputs up to 20GB can be shared openly and freely
- There is no ‘vendor lock in’ on research outputs shared via Figshare and all outputs are discoverable to the world (dependent on embargos and licenses)
- We have an openly documented API with freely accessible training documentation and videos to empower API users
- We embrace and practice core open research standards, with DataCite DOI minting, machine readable metadata, licenses, and OAI-PMH interoperability
- We integrate with the rest of the scholarly ecosystem including preservation software, aggregators and discovery layers to drive interconnectivity and discoverability
A Digital Science Solution
Figshare is part of a portfolio of solutions from Digital Science, an innovative technology company providing solutions to complex challenges faced by researchers, universities, funders, industry and publishers.
Founded by researchers themselves, Digital Science works in partnership with its communities to advance global research for the benefit of society, solving problems together, in order to drive progress for all.
Our timeline
Explore the key dates, developments and milestones in our history.
2018
Virus scanning and iThenticate were implemented for Figshare for Publishers. To make Figshare for Institutions suitable for all content types, not just data, we implemented custom domains, a funding metadata field, a ReadCube integration for displaying Open Access paper PDFs, GDPR compliance features, and follow/e-alerts across all enterprise offerings.
2021
Figshare Plus was launched in response to a growing number of requests from researchers seeking to use figshare.com who needed more storage space for their data or larger file size uploads. There are few options for researchers to share TBs of data in a FAIR way. There are also long term ongoing costs in ensuring the data persists. Figshare Plus offers data deposit as a one-time Data Publishing Charge (DPC) to share the datasets and materials supporting a specific publication or project.
2023
Figshare’s user interface saw a major update with the redesign of our ‘edit item’ page, enhancing the way in which users uploaded their research to Figshare. The new edit item page greatly improved accessibility standards, provided the foundation for further metadata functionality enhancements and user testing suggested it improved user behavior in regards to metadata provision.
