Figshare: a new way to publish scientific research data

"Yet one problem that remains is the amount of data that remains unpublished, unshared and essentially wasted. But why is this? As Professor Colin Blakemore suggested in a Radio 4 interview recently, “Memory is getting cheaper, access to information is getting much, much easier. So why shouldn’t we just simply put the raw data for everything that scientists do up on the web, accessible to every other scientists, so that they can scrutinise it, use it, data-mine it, combine it with other information and gain more useful evidence?” This is where our venture comes in. Figshare is a free service allowing researchers to publish all of their research outputs to the web in seconds in an easily citable, sharable and discoverable manner. We aim to show researchers that they can get the credit for all of their research, whilst at the same time moving research forward in a more efficient manner. Researchers can publish figures, datasets, tables, videos, anything. All file formats can be published, including videos and datasets that are often demoted to the supplemental materials section in current journals. Up to 1GB of data can be stored privately for free, and users have unlimited space for publicly available research. Using this, researchers could easily publish null results, avoiding the file drawer effect and helping to make scientific research more efficient by opening up the peer review process. We also use Creative Commons licensing to allow frictionless sharing of research data, while allowing researchers to choose when and if they make data publicly available...."