Open research

One of the biggest incentives in academia is proof of the impact of your research. This often helps with promotion and tenure. Whilst measures like the impact factor have been repeatedly demonstrated to be compromisable, citations are still recognised by researchers as the gold standard for academic impact. With citations of non-traditional research outputs (NTROs) such a…

By Mark Hahnel A large number of funders around the world now mandate publishing data needed to reproduce findings from the research they fund – at the same time as the paper is published. This is a change for academics. We have found through our State of Open Data reports that the majority of researchers are new to the concept…

As a general rule, academics should cite sources any time that you use someone else’s words, methods, data or ideas in a piece of your own research. With data and code, we see many ways in which re-use occurs, whether it be directly incorporating the data into your own raw data, running someone else’s analysis…

Recently, we partnered with our sister company Dimensions to offer daily citations updates on any object within any Figshare instance. Our State of Open Data report that comes out each year has consistently highlighted that increased impact and visibility is the number one driver (78% on respondents value data citations as much or more than a paper citation) are the…

As well as providing data repository functionality for organisations ranging from the NIH to Springer Nature, we also have a free product offering, which we refer to internally as ‘figshare.com.’ This allows researchers from around the world to make data available at no cost, get a DOI for their published research, and track the impact.…

In the last decade, we’ve seen repeated reports of highlighting a lack of reproducibility and replicability in published academic research results. This has led to institutional, publisher and most significantly funder mandates for research data being made openly available at the point of publication of the paper. Over 10 years, we have seen the ground…

The open research data space is picking up pace on all fronts at the moment. There has been an upswell in the focus on data from traditional academic publishers as well as recent policy pushes from the NIH draft policy and CODATA’s Beijing Declaration. The most obvious progress has come from the Data policy standardisation and implementation RDA interest…

Last week saw two releases from organisations which will have a big impact on the next decade in academic research. Following on from the US Government’s OPEN data policy in January, the National Institute of Health (NIH) has released their draft open data policy! The NIH is seeking public input on a trans-NIH data management and sharing policy…

Guest post by Mayank Kejriwal. Publications are the bread and butter of academics and researchers across disciplines, nationalities and institutions. Non-linear variants notwithstanding, the typical academic pursuit consists in devising a research question, doing the necessary background research, formulating and conducting experiments, and then writing it all up. The process is iterative and requires course…