Welcoming FigShare, an open data project, to the Digital Science family

We’re thrilled to welcome FigShare, an open data project founded by Mark Hahnel, to the Digital Science team. Mark will join the Research Tools team as a Product Manager for FigShare, where he will continue to develop this community resource with support from Digital Science. 

Mark started work on FigShare, while working towards his PhD at Imperial College. He was frustrated by the duplication and waste in scientific research that results from a lack of data sharing. FigShare provides a means to publish your data in an easily searchable, sharable and citable manner. The ultimate intention is to enable and encourage users to share all of their data, whether published, unpublished or containing negative results. 

Over the last few months we’ve announced a number of investments and partnerships with teams that are building software tools for research. This reflects our hybrid approach, which combines internal software development with a startup incubator. However, our relationship with FigShare is slightly different to our other collaborations to date because it will retain autonomy as a non-commercial community project while receiving support from Digital Science. 

We believe that there’s much to be learned from ambitious projects like FigShare, and much to be gained by science if they can become useful and ubiquitous. 

 For more information, visit http://FigShare.com.