Comparing Project and Collection features
Figshare offers two methods for collecting research, Projects and Collections. While both features allow users to collect and display research, they each serve different purposes. At a high level, Projects are a place to collaborate and aggregate private and public items that are related whereas Collections are a way to group items together in order to provide one citation – for example this is useful when reusing datasets for new research. This article outlines some of the key differences between the two features.
Projects
Collaboration
Projects are available to support collaborating between users, both within their institution and outside their institution. Users can invite individuals to collaborate on a Project as either:
- A contributor – a user that can add items to the project and can add comments to the project.
- A viewer – a user that can see the private project but cannot make changes.
For details of how to invite individuals to a Project, see the Project user guide.
Projects also support a comment function which allows members of a project to provide feedback for other project members either on the items within the Project or on the Project itself. These comments are not made public and can only be seen by other Project members.
Adding items
An item can only be a part of one project and must be owned by either the Project owner or a project contributor in order to be added to the Project.
Storage
Users within Institutional portals are able to create either an individual or a group project. Any item that is created within (or moved to) a Group Project will use the associated groups storage rather than the individual users storage. This allows institutional portals to use Projects as a way of distributing additional storage.
In an event that an item is published in a Group Project the owner is considered the Group. This means that the item will remain in the Project even if the item owner leaves the project.
Publication
When publishing a project, a user shares the project page containing all the public items within the Project. This will appear within search results and will be automatically updated whenever any changes are made to the project metadata (without generating a project version).
The Project will not receive a DOI as it is not considered a publication in itself. As a result it can only be shared using the project DOI, through the Figshare search, or through inviting a user to become a Project member.
Collections
Collaboration
Collections are not built for collaboration, whilst they can be used as a method for sharing a group of items, only the Collection owner is able to add/remove items from a collection. There is also no private comment functionality as with projects.
Adding items
The Collection owner can add any items to their collection. There is no limit to the number of Collections an item can be included in, and the Collection owner does not need to own the items that they are adding to the collection. It is also possible to add items to a Collection outside of the institution portal that the Collection has been created in.
Unlike in Projects, users can choose which version of the item they wish to add to the Collection (it does not have to be the most recent version of the item).
Storage
As items that are included in a Collection have already been created elsewhere, there are no storage requirements for a collection.
Publication
When publishing a Collection, a user shares the collection page containing all the public items within the Collection. Should any changes be made to the Collection post publication, these will not automatically be published and will instead be saved on the private page.
To make Collection changes public, the user must generate a new version of the Collection (through selecting Save and Publish). This is required as Collections do receive a DOI and a record of the collection is shared with Datacite. This must be updated to reflect any public changes to the Collection through generating a new version.
Summary
An outline of the different permissions between Projects and Collections can be seen in the table below.
| Projects | Collections | |
| What items can be added? | Only those owned by Project members Private or Public items |
Any item from across Figshare repositories Public items only |
| Visibility options | Private or Public | Private or Public |
| Receive a DOI | No | Yes |
| Have versioning | No | Yes |
| Metrics | Views | Views, Citation count, Altmetric badge |
| Enable collaboration | Yes – invite viewers or collaborators | No – Only one owner/editor |
| Have commenting feature | Yes | No |
