Figshare for sharing academic papers with their datasets | jill/txt

"My paper for Chercher le texte, the Electronic Literature Organization’s 2013 conference in Paris next month, is about ready and I’ve uploaded it to the ELO conference website and to Figshare. Figshare was new to me. It’s an open access non-peer-reviewed research repository built to contain more than just papers: the idea is that you share your datasets, images, posters or whatever – and if you like a traditional paper as well – and Figshare sets you up with a nice website for your research materials all citation ready. My paper is a network analysis of links to creative works of electronic literature from dissertations on electronic literature, so Figshare makes it easy to share the paper along with that data, allowing anyone else who is interested to import the same data into Gephi or some other software and do their own exploration of it. Excellent! It’s like GitHub for academics! Of course, some academics already use GitHub in fascinating ways, but I do like the idea of a site specifically for academic datasets, and I especially appreciate the citation information they provide. It also provides versioning, which is useful for this kind of data – I hope to get more PhD dissertations analysed before the conference, and when I do, I’ll update the dataset and the paper too – and Figshare will keep track of that for me."