Just got pointed to this post: Welcoming FigShare, an open data project, to the Digital Science family – DIGITAL SCIENCE: Applications and services for researchers
Digital Science provides software and information to support researchers and research administrators in their everyday work, with the ultimate aim of making science more productive through the use of technology. As well as developing our own solutions, we also invest in promising start-ups and other partners, working closely with them to help them realise their full potential.We are a business unit of Macmillan Publishers Ltd. and our activities build on the reputation for editorial and technological excellence of its sister company, Nature Publishing Group (NPG).
So basically they partner with and/or acquire companies that are playing with new technologies for communicating science. OK. I can wrap my brain around that at least for now. Whatever Digital Science does is not the point of my post here though. FigShare is.
FigShare is an interesting take on the movement to get people to share and release more unpublished/prepublication data sets. From their website:
FigShare is is a permanent, citable archive for pre-publication research and preliminary findings.
FigShare is the first online repository for storing and sharing all of your prelimonary findings in the form of individual figures or datasets. Post preprint figures on FigShare to claim priority and receive feedback on your findings prior to formal publication.
So in essence FigShare is trying to be an ArXiv for data sets (and figures presenting summaries of data).
One very nice thing – under FigShare data sets are published under a CC0 license which in essence puts the data into the public domain. And Figures and Media are published under a CC BY3.0 license which is pretty broad (attribution required).
They also emphasize a goal of getting people to deposit so-called negative results (which might be hard to publish in a traditional paper I suppose). However, it seems that this system is really for any type of prepublication release of data or media or figures.
Lots of cool things happening these days in terms of data sharing efforts. Most of it I am still learning about so maybe I should not even try to summarize it. But if others out there want to post links to other open data efforts that would be great.
Anyway – the Digital Science and FigShare thing caught my eye and just thought I would dig a little into them and post a few details.
UPDATE: Decided to post some Figures from Fig Share for people to check out:
 |
| From http://figshare.com/figures/index.php/File:Gkj042f1.jpg |
 |
| Phylogenetic tree of the isolates in this outbreak together with some other PRRSV strains with known genome sequences. Kegong Tian, Xiuling Yu, Tiezhu Zhao, Youjun Feng, Zhen Cao, Chuanbin Wang, Yan Hu, Xizhao Chen, Dongmei Hu, Xinsheng Tian, Di Liu, Shuo Zhang, Xiaoyu Deng, Yinqiao Ding, Lu Yang, Yunxia Zhang, Haixia Xiao, Mingming Qiao, Bin Wang, Lili Hou, Xiaoying Wang, Xinyan Yang, Liping Kang, Ming Sun, Ping Jin, Shujuan Wang, Yoshihiro Kitamura, Jinghua Yan, George F. Gao. FigShare. Retrieved 07:18, September 9, 2011 |
There are of course, lots more ….
Share this:
Jonathan Eisen's Lab 
Right, I have been wanting a database for so called negative results so badly. But how do we incentivize depositors. Perhaps give each dataset a DOI that they can put on their CV under a new “Datasets” section.
LikeLike