As we've seen over the past months, research output is far more than just publications in the form of articles, chapters, and monographs. Research data is becoming more and more important, and presentations, posters, and videos, for example, are all considered proper research products. And sharing these products is becoming more of a standard practice. But how do you share your non-traditional research output in a way that makes it discoverable and citeable? This is where Figshare comes in.

What is Figshare?

Figshare is a service that allows researchers to share all of their research output under a Creative Commons license, with a stable URL and with a DOI assigned. Beyond sharing your data and other research products, you can also use Figshare as a secure storage facility. This is a freemium service, where Figshare gives you 1GB of storage free and you can upgrade for more space and services.

More than sharing your work

Of course, not only can you share your work, you can also search for what other people have shared. This makes it easy to discover interesting information from people working in your field and maybe even encountering potential collaborators. It is important to note here that at the moment, Figshare is most used by those in the STEM, Life and Social Sciences, though there is plenty of Humanities content as well.

Statistics and Open Access

Another interesting feature is Figshare's usage statistics for your uploads. Figshare shows you the views and shares of your items and notes that the option to view cites is coming soon. Figshare is also integrated with ORCID and altmetrics providers such as Impactstory and altmetric.com. When uploading to Figshare, you share your research under a Creative Commons license, which means publishing to Figshare is a form of Open Access publication. Do note that not everyone will be pleased to publish under an attribution-only license CC-BY so be aware of what this entails and whether you are comfortable with this.

You can learn more about Figshare on our In Depth page for the service and of course at Figshare itself.