Dr Peter Wilf, Professor of Geosciences at Penn State, and his collaborators use Figshare+ to:
- Store over 150 GBs of images of living and fossil leaves
- Easily share large files without the administrative burden of sharing with individuals
- Track impact using Figshare’s usage, citation, and Altmetric data
Dr Wilf and his collaborators needed a repository platform for storing his data-intensive research projects in the form of two image databases of living and fossil leaves, each database about 75 GB. Having used Figshare in the past for publishing image libraries – and even his PhD thesis – he used Figshare+ to support this larger project.
Figshare+ is a platform for researchers to publish their big datasets while benefiting from additional depositing and metadata support from Figshare’s data sharing experts.
With Figshare+, Dr Wilf was able to publish tens of thousands of images of interest to the botanical and paleobotanical communities that could never fit in a standard journal article and otherwise wouldn‚Äôt have been publicly available. Users can easily download an entire database or individual images, depending on their needs, and can use Figshare’s API to programmatically access the databases.
Figshare+ also supports publisher and funder requirements for data sharing; Dr Wilf’s databases were published to correspond with associated peer-reviewed publications in PeerJ and PhytoKeys, and they include funding metadata for grants supporting the work from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Park Service, and others. Figshare+ offers a sustainable, secure way of ensuring that the datasets are available in the long term as well as discoverable and citable in line with FAIR data best practices.
As of January 2023, the two leaf databases uploaded to Figshare+ have had over 4,700 total views and nearly 2,000 total downloads. They have even been reused by colleagues teaching university botany courses because the students can access the databases themselves, freely and easily.
Check out Dr Wilf’s datasets:
First fossil-leaf floras from Brunei Darussalam show dipterocarp dominance in Borneo by the Pliocene
