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Bollocks to waiting 10 years for progress

March 23rd, 2011 by
Open Data warrior Mark Hahnel (), the creator of FigShare, explains in this guest post the motivation behind the project and asks researchers why they aren’t publishing their research data.

I read a good quote the other day:

“Bollocks to waiting 10 years for progress. I want people to know about it now, and then do something about it” – Dr Paul Fisher

So why do we wait? Why isn’t there immediate publication, analysis and dissemination of data? Publication of Scientific data as it stands is a broken business model…for the most part. The advent of journals like PLoS and their subsequent success shows that the scientific community is taking note of what steps need to be taken. In my short life as a scientist, there has always been one thing that really annoys me. The inefficiency of scientific publishing and subsequent global sharing of knowledge. In terms of making significant advances available to wide audiences as peer reviewed publications, PLoS has it covered. But what about the rest of your research?

What percentage of the figures that went into your undergrad, masters or doctorate thesis were ever published? The ones that you didnt publish were probably good basic science, or figures that didnt tell a complete story. As a PhD student, I became very aware of the fact that a large amount of my data, although good, would never be published as it did not show significant differences. I then began wondering how many times experiments had been repeated globally unnecessarily. And so FigShare started life as an idea for researchers to publish all of their data that would otherwise never leave their lab books. By categorising and tagging the research, it becomes very searchable and other scientists should not reproduce experiments and waste money when they have been conducted several times by other labs. Following the alpha release, FigShare received a lot of attention and a lot of feedback. This caused the site to develop and it now allows the upload of Figures, Datasets and most recently media (eg. videos).

This is not a new idea, and big data and data sharing projects have won several big JISC grants, but your average researcher needs this to be simple in order to adopt. The CKAN repository is a fantastic project which allows you to upload data from any field, such as government finances, weather forecasts and traffic reports. Where I feel this becomes inaccessible for scientists is the ease of uploads. A choice from 50 licenses for your data is intimidating enough to make most postdocs turn and run. For a project like FigShare, the more research that is uploaded, the more useful the site becomes. In order for this to happen, uploading research needs to be simple. This is what FigShare gives you. Give your bit of research, be it a figure, dataset or some other media format a name, hit upload, add details like your name, some tags and you have a nicely presented, citable, published figure.

FigShare now also serves as a repository for preprints figures. ie. Figures that will one day be published but feedback is requested on the prelimonary data. FigShare can be used as a platform to collaborate where users can contact one another and request to use figures in their publications etc. This means that previous unused figures, maybe from unfinished postdocs or PhD projects can be published, gaining the author more publications.

There is also the ability to easily share your figures, datasets and videos via a host of social media platforms through ‘share buttons’ on every page. This is a new way of bringing scientific research online and to a new audience. An example of how this can benefit science is already producing examples such as this one – A lot of scientists hear how social media can benefit research and yet there has been little evidence of how these tools can be exploited to make science more efficient. Imagine real time discussions about science you did yesterday, not last year when you first submitted your paper.

FigShare is a permanent database of your research. To further ensure this, FigShare is supported by Systems Institute. Systems Institute is a not for profit which is providing ongoing support for the hosting of FigShare as it expands. This also allows FigShare to make backups of all of your data each and every day.

So please, upload your data now and do your bit to help science progress in an efficient manner. It’ll probably do wonders for your academic career too!

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