Monash University and Figshare Partner to Combine Cloud Management & Discoverability with Institutional Storage.

Figshare are very proud to announce Monash University as the first Australian customer of their research data management solution, Figshare for institutions. They have spent the last 6 months developing functionality and workflows which enable research institutions to store, manage and share all of their research outputs.  Since 2012 they have been working with the community to develop new methods of research data management and dissemination. Their partnership with Monash University has helped them develop the necessary administration control, reporting and analytic capability to meet the needs of a leading research institution.

When selecting a solution Monash identified some key requirements:

• Convenient and easy to use
• Allow researchers to create metadata at points when it was relevant
• Give researchers control of sharing their research data
• Make publishing data a one click process
• Provide the flexibility of the cloud with the confidence of ongoing storage with in the institution

The final point highlights one of the key developments of Figshare for institutions. Figshare have always been able to offer industry leading, secure storage with Amazon Web Services. They  are now able to integrate with any existing storage solution, whether it be local institutional storage or central infrastructure such as RDSI nodes.

Monash University wanted to support 3 domains of managing research – private, shared and public. They understood that researchers needed to keep their research private whilst still generating data and perhaps share with select individuals and collaborators. Existing proesses for moving data to central repository but existing systems were cumbersome and Monash University wanted to make that process as easy as possible. Finally, they wanted to enable researchers to publish their research data so other researchers could understand and re-use their data. These principles are aligned with the Data FAIReport which encourages data to be published in a way that makes it easy to find, access, interoperate and re-use.

“Our researchers are already sharing their research in places like Dropbox and publishing their  outputs on social platforms and their own websites” said David Groenewegen, Director,  Research Infrastructure at Monash University Library. “We wanted to make it easier for them to store, share and publish their data, while offering them the security of storage at Monash. Figshare was presented a an attractive options for our research data management solution and we look forward to a productive partnership.”

Figshare for institutions, which is in the final stages of development is set to go-live at Monash University in early 2015 and will be gradually rolled out to all researchers. Figshare will be working to ensure there is a high adoption rate at Monash University and that researchers are satisfied with their experience with the platform. They will also be working to migrate data to the new platform, provide more impact measures, new metadata schemas as well as integration with existing systems.