Linking to the Cloud – Making Everything Seamless | Blog - Projects

"The web has enabled some fantastic new opportunities in the academic space, least not in the way in which we manage and disseminate research outputs. In the research cycle, academics often spend little time thinking about their outputs until they are writing up a paper or a thesis. As many of you will no doubt have discovered, this is often a bit late in the game when you are actively looking for files! Projects’ main aim is to help at this stage. Where we are looking to continue developing is the way in which we connect this to the enormous power of the web. Initial user feedback has confirmed what our earlier research had told us, that we should look at the best ways to connect Projects to other colleagues, lab mates and collaborators. There has also been a desire to comply with funder ‘open mandates’ in the dissemination of research outputs in a simple manner. Luckily, one of Projects’ sister companies at Digital Science, figshare, has been concentrating on solving precisely this problem for academics. figshare is a platform where academics can privately and securely store their research outputs, or make them citable, sharable and discoverable with just the click of a button, for free. For this reason, our obvious first step is to integrate Projects with figshare. Our latest release now allows users to connect to their figshare account and push files into their private figshare space directly from the Projects app. Here, they just need to fill in a little metadata in order to make these files sharable with the wider world. This simple workflow can be seen here ... As we continue to develop linking with figshare, the pathway from research output management to dissemination, both controlled and open, will become a much more seamless workflow. This is part of the bigger Digital Science vision in general. Digital Science’s portfolio companies each help with tasks at different points in the research cycle. The potential for using the core features of each tool, to make your research management and funding compliance an automated process, is huge. Of course, the first step in all of this will be with Projects.  We’d love to hear your feedback on all of the above and how you’d like Projects to develop ..."