Figshare: Diving into the haystack to make more hay?

"... With recent advances in data science and information management, research discovery has become one of the most pressing and fastest growing areas of interest. Reference managers (ReadCube, Mendeley, Zotero) and dedicated services have been experimenting with novel ways to deliver relevant articles to scholars (PubChase, Sparrho, Eigenfactor Recommends). While we have by no means exhausted the number of ways to innovate and make them mainstream, we have yet to turn our attention to scholarly objects beyond the article. The utility of finding the full research narrative is established, a given. But the potential value of discovering and accessing scholarly outputs that are created before final results are communicated or never integrated into an article at all is almost untapped. Until now ... Last year, our partnership with figshare began with the hosting and display of Supporting Information files on the article, accommodating the broad range of file types found in this mixing pot. Both the Supporting Information file viewer and figshare's PLOS figure and data portalincrease the accessibility of the data and article component content associated with our articles. The latter makes PLOS figures, tables, and SI files searchable based upon key terms of interest.  Beyond the article: Today, we continue to build on the figshare offering with the launch of research recommendations, a service which delivers relevant outputs associated with PLOS articles and beyond. This begins to fill a critical need for tools that address the full breadth of research content. Rather than being limited by the article as a container, we can now present a far broader universe of scholarly objects: figures, datasets, media, code, software, filesets, scripts, etc. ..."