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Startup of the Week: Figshare


25 Jul 2014

Figshare wants to open up scientific research and data to the world. The idea was first born in 2010 while founder Mark Hahnel was studying at Imperial College London, before a 2012 launch. He wanted to develop a way to share all kinds of datasets -- digital and otherwise -- in an easy-to-use, opensource way. At that point it was just to "allow scientists and researchers like me to get credit and recognition for all their work," says Hahnel. Two years on and the platform now has employees in the UK, US and Romania and serves hundreds of thousands of researchers a month, hosting more than 1.5 million files. While the basic platform is free, for a fee additional services are unlocked. Some of the biggest and most prestigious scientific journals in the world also use Figshare to store and visualise their data, including PLOS, Nature Publishing Group, Taylor & Francis and F1000. "We also partner with some of the largest and most prestigious academic institutions in the world to help them better manage their research data," adds Hahnel.

The entrepreneur believes that the more data researchers can publish online, publically, the more sure we will be of the veracity of that data. "The more raw data available, the greater the transparency and the easier it is to verify the results."

Founder: Mark Hahnel

Launched: 2012

Headquarters: London

Staff: 16

Funding: From Digital Science, the global technology division of Macmillan Science & Education

Where did you get the idea for the business?

I first came up with the idea for Figshare whilst working on my PhD in Stem Cell biology at Imperial College London in 2010. During the course I created a plethora of materials and data -- figures, documents, graphs, datasets, posters and video. I created Figshare as a place where I could share ALL my work and make it available to ANYONE.

What is your USP?

Figshare is the only platform that allows researchers to upload any academic file -- images, videos, datasets, posters, presentations, papers, theses or even software code. Once the file is uploaded we visualise it within the browser, this is important to allow researchers to view files quickly and without the need of third party software. We give every uploaded file a unique persistent link called a digital object identifier (DOI). This is the gold standard of referencing in academia and ensures that everything on Figshare is citable in the long term.

What problem do you solve?

Today researchers disseminate their results through academic papers, a format that has barely evolved in centuries. Researchers create a vast amount of data in various formats but are forced to share their results through pdfs -- static documents with limited functionality. They also deserve to get credit for the bulk of their work that currently goes unpublished. Figshare is a platform where researchers can store, share and get credit for all of their research.

Governments, funders and publishers are also increasingly introducing open data mandates, which require researchers to make all of their data publicly available.

How do you plan to make money?

We make money in three ways. First, there is a Premium product available which gives researchers 20GB of private online storage space and private collaborative spaces for up to 20 research collaborators. Second, we enable publishers to host large amounts of the data behind their online articles, with no impact on their own infrastructure (Figshare hosts them in the cloud).

Lastly, there has been a global push by global governments to make academic research data open and accessible and a growing mandate from a wide group of funders for researchers and academic institutions to better manage, disseminate and share their digital research outputs. This is increasingly becoming a mandate for receiving funding, so Figshare launched Figshare for Institutions last year to securely host research data in the cloud, privately or publicly. It has garnered interest from universities and research institutions across the globe, from Europe to the US and Australia.

What is the incentive to pay for the Premium service?

With Figshare premium individual users get more storage space and enhanced group collaboration features, which are ideal for larger teams and geographically dispersed research groups.

Who do you view as your competitors?

Our biggest competitors are generic free hosting and data sharing services such as Dropbox. Some academic institutions have started to build their own institutional repositories at enormous financial costs and man-hours, at much greater expense than investing in a product like Figshare. Some other scientific online repositories include Dryad and academia.edu; but neither of them offers the full spectrum of services to end users, publishers and academic institutions.

How would you sum up your company ethos?

Our mission is to improve and open up the dissemination and discovery of scientific research.

What's the biggest misconception about your business?

Many people think it's only for making your data publicly available, but we also have robust functionality for the day-to-day management of research data including private sharing and collaboration. Another misconception is that a figure has to be a static image, there is no reason why "fig. 1" couldn't be a video, dataset, computer code or any file that is relevant to the research and gives the reader better context.

What pushed you to stop talking about launching a startup and actually do it?

When I was studying for my PhD I was frustrated at the lack of modern techniques and technologies available to me within academia, and was determined to change it. I had the idea for Figshare and, with my basic coding skills, hacked together a proof of concept. I was introduced to Timo Hannay at Digital Science who offered me a desk and a small budget to see what we could do with my idea. The team worked hard and in close contact with the community to build a solution that is innovative and disruptive but still practical.

How has the business developed since then?

In three years we have grown from a company of four people with one product and a small but passionate user base, to a team of nearly 20 people with multiple products serving some of the largest academic publishers and institutions in the world. We are used by 100,000s of researchers and we host over 1.5 million files, most of which would not be publicly available without Figshare.

What has been the most challenging time for the company?

Starting up! I was finishing my PhD at the same time as setting up the company. I had no prior business experience, but I understood the needs of researchers.

How did you overcome that?

The first three Figshare team members all worked on building it before we had even secured funding. Digital Science has provided us with professional support including legal, financial, marketing and more. With this guidance, we have tailored Figshare to provide specific services for publishers and institutions, whilst staying true to our original message around open research.

Do you have any advice for dealing with potential investors?

Don't be afraid that you might look naïve if you ask what might appear to be the stupid or obvious questions. Obvious questions can result in honest answers.

What is the best piece of advice anyone has ever given you?

"Never forget who you are" -- Apu Nahasapeemapetilon's parents in

The Simpsons.

Which businessperson do you most admire and why?

Elon Musk is an obvious one. The cushion that Paypal provided him with undoubtedly made him daring enough to start the companies that every 12-year-old dreams of, but it still takes a certain kind of unique person to turn them into commercial successes.

What is your biggest barrier to future success?

Resistance to change in the academic community, it's an old system but with the right incentives we believe that change will come.

Where do you see the company - and academia -- in ten year's time?

Academic research of the future will be more open and will be served by better technology. Academic publishing will continue to innovate and evolve to add value to and disseminate content in a way we could have never imagined even five years ago.

For us the Shangri-La is a world where a group of researchers generate new information based on new hypotheses, make it available on Figshare and then others pull together the combined world's knowledge to look for new patterns and discoveries that the original authors had not thought to look for. These data scientists will need tools, which we have already made available on our open API. I'd love to see more of these tools helping more people make more discoveries, more often.

In an ideal world all scientific data would be open source surely, but how is that a viable model -- both in a business sense, and also in terms of verifying data stringently?

We'd love all scientific data to be open source but realistically commercial R&D firms aren't likely to share our views. At the very least all publically funded research should be openly available and not trapped behind pay walls or sat on dusty institutional servers. Open data is one way to avoid fake data, or plagiarism. If everything was open, data forensics could be performed, wide peer review and reproducibility of data can be performed, especially in the more computational subjects.
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