We’re excited to announce an enhancement to an existing feature and extension of our integration with sister product Dimensions, which allows Figshare users to add funding information to their items and collections. Whilst there has been a funding field on the platform for many years it has been solely a free text field. With the improved integration you will now be able to lookup funder and grant information from a comprehensive list using the grant name, code or funder body.
The grant codes are already included in the funder acknowledgement section of articles so will provide a reliable method to infer publication-data links. ‘Identifiers for everything’ is one of the core Figshare beliefs and will help enable more accurate linking, sorting and reporting of research outputs. This funding enhancement is also in alignment with the FAIR principles by ensuring metadata associated with Figshare items is more findable, interoperable and reusable.
Figshare is also adding traditional IR functionality to its already robust data repository capability to create an ‘all in one repository’. This new enhanced funding feature would allow all the open access papers, data, code, media and other outputs from one grant to be automatically grouped together in one collection. This automatic grouping could also be applied at the funder level, to give a more complete picture of the attention and impact of all the grants given by a particular funder. If you are a funder who would be interested in monitoring compliance of the openness of the research outputs you fund, please let us know.
This feature is not just for new uploads. If you already have an item on Figshare you can go back and update the funding information. The list from Dimensions is comprehensive but if the grant code is not in the lookup list, you will still be able to add free text.