Integrations

Key topics:
List of Figshare Integrations
– Built-in integrations
– Integrations available to individual users
– Other tools and apps
ORCID: How to connect to your ORCID profile
GitHub: How to connect Figshare with your GitHub account
Figshare code repository setup & implementation: GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket

List of Figshare Integrations

Built-in integrations

Usage Metrics

  • Dimensions funding and citation information
  • Altmetrics donut
  • Readcube
  • Clamav virus scanner

Integrations available to individual users

  • Github
  • ORCiD (configure within your Figshare account)
  • Binder – Enter a data or code Figshare DOI to launch a Figshare project as a Binder. This will launch an interactive environment based on the content and configuration files in the project. (see the public BinderHub here: https://mybinder.org/)
  • RSpace – Integrate your RSpace Electronic Lab Notebook with your Figshare account.
  • Overleaf – Publish your Overleaf projects directly to Figshare.
  • Open Science Framework (OSF) – Connect Figshare to your OSF project.
  • ImpactStory – Link your Figshare and ImpactStory accounts.
  • Lab Notebooks
    • LabArchives – Export from your LabArchives Notebook to your Figshare account
    • RSpace – Integrate your RSpace Electronic Lab Notebook with your Figshare account. Follow these steps to learn how to enable the integration.
    • labfolder – Import your Figshare items into your labfolder account using this integration, documented here.

Other tools and apps

Others have made many tools or applications that work with Figshare. A general search of GitHub gives a quite a few results! Below are just a few examples.

  • Uploader for large files and associated metadata – This application enables the bulk upload of files and associated metadata kept in an excel spreadsheet to the Figshare repository.
  • GitHub: OmniAuth Strategy – An OmniAuth Strategy for the Figshare API. You can use it to authenticate users against the Figshare API in your ruby on rails/sinatra/other rack-based web application.
  • GitHub: Figshare Harvester for OpenVIVO – The harvester supports harvesting by tag. Given a tag, the harvester gathers all the content from Figshare with the specified tag, producing RDF for each work. The Harvester uses openVIVO URI conventions for dates and people. Only identified works and identified people are included in the RDF.
  • GitHub: Figshare Python Recommender – A Python script that ingests Figshare’s API data and transforms it into data suitable for loading into a recommendation engine. In our case, we save the recommendation data in Kafka but you can easily change this in ingest.py.
  • GitHub: Scala/Apache Ignite Recommendation Engine – A Scala/Apache Ignite collaborative-filtering based recommendation engine largely stolen from a Spark library but re-written to be a lot faster, flexible and scalable, perfect for Figshare data.
  • GitHub: Client for Figshare API – This is a simple client for the Figshare API in python.
  • GitHub: iRODS – Playground for iRODS integration.

Harvesting/Aggregation/OAI_PMH

Figshare supports interoperability of metadata via OAI-PMH. All metadata scross Figshare is exportable and harvestable using our OAI-PMH endpoints. In order to harvest Figshare metadata from your Figshare repository only, you will need to filter the Figshare ListSet for your portal ID.

You will be provided with your stage and production environments’ OAI-PMH ListSet URL during your Figshare Implementation.

If you are an existing Client and do not know your ListSet ID, Figshare can provide you with the OAI-PMH ListSet for your stage and production environments. Please contact our Support Team to request your OAI-PMH ListSet URLs.

FIgshare and/or some of our existing institutional partners have successfully established harvests to the following services and/or national aggregators:

  • Google Scholar and Google Dataset search
  • Primo
  • Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD)
  • Re3Data
  • Trove (ANDS)
  • Research Data Australia – RDA (ARDC)
  • IRUS-UK
  • Openaire 
  • EThOs (UK theses & dissertations)
  • Core
  • Helt (UK institutions)
  • DigitalNZ

How to connect to your ORCID profile

What is ORCID?

ORCID is an open, non-profit, community-driven effort to create and maintain a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers. For more information please go to: https://orcid.org/content/about-orcid.

Setting up the integration

First you need to connect your Figshare account to your ORCID account. You can do this straight from the ‘Profile’ link or from the ‘Applications’ link available in your user icon dropdown (upper right part of the page). Click “Connect” and you’ll be sent off to ORCID to verify your account and then we can get started. You’ll then be presented with 3 options, all off by default.

Push data to my ORCID

This option creates a record in your ORCID account of any items that you publish on Figshare. It’s good to note that this will create a record using the base DOI only, versioned DOIs are omitted. The base DOI will always point to the latest version of your item. This long-requested functionality avoids the issue of significant duplicate entries within your ORCID account. 

Please note: if you have a synchronization set up from a DOI provider like Datacite and you enable this option, there is a chance you’ll get duplicate records in your ORCID account.

This feature will only kick in for items created after the integration has been performed. Any existing items in your Figshare account will not be pushed using this method. If you need to get historic items into your ORCID account and they have not been captured by the existing Datacite integration, this will need to be done manually. 

Pull data from my ORCID to my Figshare account 

This one is all about your Figshare profile and your profile only. Nothing imported here will interact with your My Data area (that’s where option 3 comes in).

This will import everything in your ORCID works section to the publications area of your Figshare profile. Unlike the previous setting, this will import everything BEFORE the integration was performed as well as anything created ongoing.

A list of publications will appear on the profile if this option is enabled with ORCID. Publications can be added manually as well.

Create draft records from my ORCID data 

After the integration has occurred, any new records created within the works section of your ORCID account will automatically create a new draft metadata record within your My Data area. We’ll pull in as much available metadata as we can, as well as creating the metadata record with the DOI of the original object.

Once a new draft item has been created from this integration, you’ll get two kinds of notifications: an email to your account email address and a notification within the platform (coming October 2021). You can then choose to add a file for this record, such as an open access version of a publication, and any additional metadata or delete the draft record if it’s not needed. 

ORCID integration FAQs

Won’t things get stuck in a loop?

No, these items won’t be reimported. 

Will things continually create metadata records if I delete them as I don’t want to make a repository version for that work?

No, things will only be imported once. If you delete them, it won’t happen again. 

Are there any other implications of connecting my ORCID?

Nothing new, but it seems a good time to reiterate the current benefits of having an ORCID and connecting it to your Figshare account:

  • Your ORCID is part of the item’s metadata 
  • Your ORCID is sent along with additional metadata when minting a DOI to a supporting partner such as Datacite
  • You are searchable by your ORCID within Figshare
  • Disambiguates your outputs to help with the I (interoperability) in FAIR 
  • Your ORCID is displayed on your Figshare author profile page

Do I have to enable all three options? What if I don’t enable any?

You don’t have to enable any of the options. You’ll still get all the great benefits listed above if you enable none of them. You can choose to enable any combination of the three; they all will work independently of each other. 

If I am using my institution’s Figshare and it doesn’t allow the creation of items with a custom DOI, can I still create metadata records?

You can, but these will be created without the original published DOI. They will be published with a new DOI / handle based on your institution’s policies. If you are unsure, speak to your institutional administrator about this. 

What if I’ve already connected my ORCID to my Figshare account?

All of the benefits you currently enjoy under “Are there any other implications of connecting my ORCID?” outlined above that you get now will still continue to work without you doing anything. For any of the new functionality to work, we’ll need new permissions from you. This means reauthorizing the ORCID application and away you go. 

How frequently are updates sent to ORCID from Figshare and vice versa?

With the power of webhooks, updates happen really quickly in a matter of minutes. 

If you require any assistance, please submit a support ticket.

How to connect Figshare with your GitHub account

You can get set up in the Applications section, also located in the dropdown menu at the top right corner next to your name. Next, select Connect on the GitHub tile.

You’ll be redirected to sign in to your Github account where you’ll authorise figshare.

Click off the Configure Github Integration overlay, go to My Data and click on the GitHub icon (that shows up after hovering the cursor on the Github symbol):

You can then start importing from GitHub from your list of public repositories:

If your repository has multiple releases, you can choose which is the first release you’d like to import. You can choose to select multiple items at the same time and each GitHub item will create it’s own figshare item. Upon import, we will automatically choose the article type, add a reference back to the original GitHub item, import the description and title from GitHub and set the default licence to MIT.  

A key aspect of setting Github up via the applications section is that you can edit the auto-sync global settings for your github integration. If you configure the auto-sync setting to ON, figshare will automatically update for every release (for each of your imported repos) and this will only occur if your figshare item is public. Each new release would generate a new version of your figshare item.

Please note: Figshare will only create a new version for a release and not a single commit.

If you have something to upload straight away you can access the Github integration directly from My Data. From My Data, select Import from GitHub, as shown above. Then select Connect and you’ll see an overlay with the public repositories available to import.

GitHub Upload Action

To help automate the publication step in GitHub-based research workflows, we’ve released the Figshare upload GitHub Action. You can incorporate the upload Action in your GitHub workflows and push your files into Figshare directly from GitHub. For details regarding the Action setup visit the GitHub repo page at https://github.com/figshare/github-upload-action.

Figshare code repository setup & implementation: GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket

Introduction

Figshare now has the potential of allowing users to integrate GitLab, GitHub and Bitbucket to their Figshare account. This allows for the easy synchronisation and publication of repositories from these services to a user’s Figshare account. They are subtly different in their implementations, with some optional availability and functionality elements that should be understood and explored.

GitHub

Figshare originally integrated with GitHub. For more details, check out our article on how to sync your GitHub account to your Figshare account on this page.

GitLab

While GitHub is still available and is the default code repository integration, institutions using Figshare will also be able to configure GitLab and Bitbucket (more information on Bitbucket is available below) integrations with their respective cloud services.

For this integration, institutions can either enable support for just https://about.gitlab.com/ accounts or also enable support for any locally-hosted GitLab repositories within your organisation. To configure this integration, please contact support@figshare.com.

How do I set up access to a locally-hosted GitLab repository for my users?

You can set up multiple GitLab instances for your users. The standard gitlab.com as well as multiple local instances. To set up an integration: 

1. Login to your locally-hosted instance

2. Go to Preferences from the user menu in the top right

3. Then click on Application

4. Then click on Add New Application

Name (Whatever you like)

          Redirect URL: https://figshare.com/external/applications/callback 

          (please note, this is for production only) 

‍

5. You’ll then need to check a number of boxes outlined above

6. Then save application 

After you have saved, go to “Your Applications” on the Applications screen and click on the newly-created application. You will then see Application ID and Secret. You’ll need to send these along with the name you want the repository to display as within your Figshare instance and the production URL of your GitLab instance. 

You can do this for numerous GitLab integrations, not just one. When you contact support@figshare.com, you’ll need to send the following details for each separate GitLab instance you wish to add to your figshare repository. Please ensure any credentials are sent via secure channels. 

  • Public URL for Local gitlab instance e.g https://gitlab.your_domain.com
  • Name for how the repository should appear within Figshare: Figshare gitlab
  • Application ID: asdciuhsaiuc
  • Secret: dcsiodcsoivnhb

Bitbucket

Bitbucket is available to all figshare.com users and optionally for FFI users. For Bitbucket, we support https://bitbucket.org accounts only, local install support is not supported.  

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