Figshare Plus user guide

Step 1: Submit a Figshare Plus order request form
Step 2: Access and set up your Figshare Plus user account 
Step 3: Accept your project invite
Step 4: Upload and describe your data
Step 5: Submit your items for review 
Step 6: Complete any recommended revisions and publish

This is a guide to sharing research data on Figshare Plus, a flexible research repository where you can make any type of data or other output of your research publicly available and associate it with related publications and research projects. Figshare Plus was created specifically to support larger datasets (over the 20GB figshare.com limit, up to many TBs) and larger file sizes together with more metadata, license options, and expert support and review. 

Figshare Plus can help you meet research funder or publisher requirements for data sharing so that you can include dataset DOIs in articles and data availability statements. Figshare Plus can also be included as part of a data management and sharing plan required by your research funder (e.g. NSF, NIH) and data publishing costs may be allowable costs for your grant budget.

Step 1: Submit a Figshare Plus order request form

If you have a big dataset to share and it meets the following data deposit eligibility requirements, submit a Figshare Plus order request.

Figshare Plus data deposit eligibility requirements:

For your order request form to be approved, your planned data deposit must:

• Support ONE specific scholarly publication or a specific research project
• Be your own scholarly research output
• Require no more than 10 unique item DOIs and one Collection DOI
• Be within the total storage limit that you have paid for
• Be submitted for review and publication within 12 months of your order request, with all items submitted at the same time
• For full details, please see the Figshare Plus terms and conditions
  
  Our team will review your request and if approved, we will:
  
• Create a Figshare Plus user account for you and invite you to a Figshare Plus project with the required storage for uploading the dataset
• Send an invoice for the one-time data publishing charge for your dataset 

You will have 12 months to submit your files and documentation to be published.

Step 2: Access and set up your Figshare Plus user account 

If this is your first time using Figshare Plus, the Figshare review team will notify you that your new Figshare Plus user account has been created and provide instructions for logging in. Make sure to log in at https://plus.figshare.com/account/login.

Once you have logged in, please sync your ORCiD (learn about ORCiD, a persistent unique identifier for researchers). An ORCiD is required for the submitting author to publish on Figshare Plus. Note that you can add your ORCiD to your Figshare Plus account even if you have already linked it to another figshare.com user account.

Step 3: Accept your project invite

Once you login to your Figshare Plus account, navigate to the Projects tab and accept the invite to the project that your account has been invited to join.  

The use of projects allows the Figshare review team to provide assistance as you upload your data, so you will find that your purchased storage space is assigned to the project, and not to your individual Figshare Plus user account. 

You should not publish this project publicly on Figshare Plus. Rather, use the project to draft your items, upload files, and submit the items to be published individually. If you have multiple items (maximum of 10) in the project that you would like to point to with a single link, you can create a Collection with its own description and DOI, add the published items to the Collection, and then publish the Collection on Figshare Plus.

Step 4: Upload and describe your data

Make sure you are in your Project space and click the + Add a new item or + Create new content button. A new tab opens and you can upload files and fill in metadata as described below.

Consider the organization of your dataset 

Before you begin, decide how you will organize your dataset. Group research products as you would want them to be cited and as they support specific publications. If you have a research project with multiple data files or outputs, you can choose to create up to 10 dataset items per Figshare Plus order. An item in the repository represents a unique page with files, a description, metadata, a citable DOI (digital object identifier), and openly tracked metrics of views, downloads, and citations. 

How you choose to group files into items should depend on how similar they are, if they are the same type of research output, and what licenses you wish to apply to which outputs. Figshare Plus offers a variety of item types based on the research product you are sharing.

You can also create and publish a Collection to group together all of the published items that are part of the dataset. A Collection offers a way to point to all of the outputs associated with a specific paper or project with a single link. Published collections have their own descriptions, DOIs, and usage metrics.

Upload your data files into items in the project 

Once you open a new item page, files can be added by dragging and dropping them into the upload box via the browser, browsing on a local drive, or by using the Figshare API (recommended for large files or many files). Documentation on how to use Figshare’s API can be found at https://docs.figshare.com/ along with some examples on our API Guide. 

Note that the Figshare FTP uploader cannot be used to upload files to projects in Figshare Plus. Contact us at review@figshare.com if you need additional assistance for large data uploads. 

If you have more than 500 files to share in a single item, you may wish to upload zipped or compressed files as archives. You can upload one or many zipped files (archives) to an item. The file names within these archives, but not the files themselves, will be previewable. If you must share more than 500 files please contact us to request an increase of this limit for your account.

If you have complex hierarchical data, Figshare supports folder upload, which allows the relationship between files to be maintained when viewing an item. Please organize your files into folders before uploading the top level folder(s), as files cannot be moved between folders after upload. 

Considerations for files

• Opt for open and preservable file formats that can be used without proprietary software when possible, even if it requires posting the same data in multiple formats.
• Use a consistent and descriptive file naming convention.
• Include documentation that would be needed to understand and reuse the data as a file together with the dataset such as a README text file, a code book, or a data dictionary.
• Adhere to any other data standards commonly used in your research community to maximize reusability.

Prepare your item metadata

Metadata describes your dataset or other research product and helps make it discoverable, trackable, and reusable. For each item you will want to ensure that the metadata and description provide complete context to the files being shared and point to related resources for someone to understand and reuse the work. 

To expedite the review and publishing of your items, please give careful consideration to the following while completing the metadata for your items:

• Title – Include a meaningful title for your items as you would for any other research work such as a paper or presentation so that the title provides context about the research question and method. If the data supports a specific publication you may include the paper title in the item title, but they should not be exactly the same (e.g. “Dataset supporting Paper Title”).
• Item Type – Select the most appropriate item type for the research product. We accept any file type and preview over 1,200 file extensions in the browser.
• Authors – Include all authors who contributed to the data or product according to research community standards. This may mirror the authorship of the related paper or may diverge based on contribution. 
• Categories – Select one or multiple categories that best represent the field of research of the item.
• Keywords – Add at least 5 keywords to best describe the research product including the field of research and methodology. These can be added as free text or added from the suggestions. Hit return after each keyword to add more.
• Description – Include a description of the specific research items shared as well as a description of the research methods used and the research study as a whole. This is important if someone discovers the research independent of any other description. This is similar to the captions you might write for a figure or the abstract you would provide for a paper. You might also wish to note related materials including publications, code, data, or webpages.
• Funding – List all supporting funding with each funding source or grant entered separately. For projects with outside funding, you can search by grant title or number (e.g. NIH or NSF) and select the appropriate grant that will appear in the auto-populating search field from the Dimensions grant database. Funding information can also be added as free text in these fields for any support not found via the search function.
• Related materials – Add linkages to other research objects using Related Materials and provide information on the relation types. Figshare uses DataCite’s standard relation types. Common relation types are IsSupplementTo and IsReferencedBy. Both of those relation types are interpreted as a citation for the dataset in DataCite’s event data. For example, to add the DOI for a paper that uses the dataset, add the title of the paper in the title field, add the paper’s DOI, select DOI from the identifier type list, and choose IsSupplementTo as the relation type. If you want to link to a related dataset or a Figshare Collection, use the IsPartOf relation type.
• License – Select an appropriate license for reuse paying particular attention to which licenses are best suited to different output types such as data, code, or written text as well as any other restrictions that may accompany the research. CC0 licenses may be useful for data to allow for the broadest reuse without restrictions. CC-BY licenses require attribution and are recommended for text materials as well as other research outputs. Figshare Plus also offers several software-specific licenses including MIT, BSD, GPL, and Apache. Learn more about licenses.
• Research institution(s) – List the research institutions that you and your collaborators on this research are affiliated with.
• Contact email – Provide an email address for researchers to contact you with questions about the research. Note that this email address will be made public with the dataset.
• Associated preprint DOI – If you have published a preprint (e.g. bioRxiv, arXiv, medRxiv) associated with this dataset, add the DOI to that preprint here. 
• Confirm there is no human personally identifiable information in the files or description shared
• Confirm the files and description shared may be publicly distributed under the license selected
• Provide a competing interest statement if applicable.

Additional edit item page features

In the upper right part of the Edit Item page, you will find additional features. 

All of the following are optional for you to use as needed:

• Add an embargo – If you wish to upload files and publish the item but restrict access to it temporarily you can apply an embargo. You can set an embargo by selecting the time period or an end date for the embargo, selecting if the embargo should apply only to the files but not the metadata and description (recommended) or to the whole item, and optionally adding a reason for the embargo. A common use case for embargoes is awaiting publication of an associated journal article. An embargo can be ended at any point by editing the item and saving the changes.
• Create a private link – You can generate a private link to a draft item for anonymous sharing with colleagues or peer reviewers – however, note that private links have author names removed and metrics such as citations are not tracked, so these links should never be used in publications or on public websites.
• Reserve a DOI – DOIs for items and collections can be reserved in advance of an item being published. When you reserve a DOI, you will want to add https://doi.org/ in front of the reserved DOI to create the link that will go live when the research is made publicly available. This can be helpful to include DOIs in manuscripts even if the data is not public yet.
• Add a custom thumbnail – This is an image that will be displayed in search results. The image is not included with the files you describe with metadata – it is purely cosmetic and a way to make your research stand out.

Considerations for open data

‍Research published on Figshare Plus will be fully public and openly available to all unless you place an embargo on the files or the item. For this reason, please consider the following when publishing data or other research materials.

• Security – Can the data and all materials be shared and fully released for public access? Are there any restrictions based on confidentiality or security?
• Ethics – consent to share, human subjects data, and personally identifiable information (PII). Note that only fully de-identified data without PII should be shared on Figshare Plus. 

Copyright or intellectual property – Do you have the right to distribute this work? How should the work be licensed for future reuse? Are there any patents to consider?

Learn more about best practices for open data.

Note that you can save your changes and return to a draft of your item in the project at any point. To enter edit mode for an item in a project, go to the gear symbol on the right and select edit item. Metadata of multiple items can be edited at once by editing in batch.

Step 5: Submit your items for review 

When you have completed adding the files and description to your item, click the Submit for review button on the right to submit your dataset or other materials to the Figshare review team. You must submit all of the items you will be publishing as part of your Figshare Plus order at one time. 

Once we receive all of your submitted items, the review team will:

• Check your metadata and description for each item
• Conduct spot checks on a sample of your data files
• Contact you within 3 business days with recommended revisions
• If no revisions are needed, the review team will notify you when your items have been published

Step 6: Complete any recommended revisions and publish

Complete the recommended revisions and resubmit your items for review. Please notify the review team when you are finished with revisions to expedite publication.

The review team will confirm that your revisions are complete and approve your items for publication within 3 business days. They will notify you when your items have been made publicly available and provide you with the DOIs for your items and Collection, if applicable.  

Editing and versioning

You can edit both draft and published items from the project using your Figshare Plus account at any point during the 12 month deposit period to update the metadata and description or release a new version of the dataset. After the 12 month deposit period, you will be able to edit the metadata but changes to the files will require a request for support from the Figshare review team. 

Each time changes are made, you will need to save and submit your items for review and the item will once again go through review before changes are reflected in the public item. A total of 5 revisions total are allowable per data publication as items will go through review each time they are revised. 
Note that some changes will result in a new version of the item that will be reflected with an appended version number at the end of the DOI – these include edits to title, authors, and files. The base DOI will resolve to the newest version and all previous versions will also remain publicly available.

‍Support

The Figshare review team is available to provide guidance at any stage of Figshare Plus data sharing. To discuss data sharing best practices or plans for publishing your research in Figshare Plus in advance of submitting your data or for review and guidance on a draft dataset you have uploaded, you are welcome to reach out to the Figshare review team by emailing review@figshare.com with specific questions or for a general consultation.