Figshare is an online repository for research data and allows data to be both discoverable and citable. Recently, Figshare has launched a new tool in collaboration with Springer Nature which is expected to support open research. In 2016, Springer Nature had launched a Research Data Support helpdesk to assist authors in complying with data sharing policies and in helping to locate appropriate data repositories for a given dataset. This partnership with Figshare is another open access tool that will allow authors to share their data via this repository and increase their peer-reviewed publications.
Also, authors who choose to use this new data submission portal will have access to secure and private submission of their files, data curation, and publisher-managed release of datasets. Furthermore, the data will be made available either under a Creative Commons license or the CC0 public domain waiver. The portal will be maintained by professional research data editors in collaboration with Figshare. Iain Hrynaszkiewicz, Head of Data Publishing at Springer Nature, has several expectations from this data submission portal:
- Making it easier for authors to comply with data policies stipulated by the funding agencies and the institutions
- Speeding up scientific progress and enhancing the ability of others to replicate a given study with available datasets
- Making it even easier to cite and reuse datasets
- Making it easier for authors to deposit and curate their datasets, as well as link these datasets with the relevant publication(s)
- Making peer-reviewed publications more visible and useful to their readers
- Enabling authors to share a wider variety of data files associated with their articles.
The open access tool was developed to support open research because researchers often want to share their data, but there is no easy process for sharing it. Thus, this data submission portal aims to make the process of supporting open research painless for authors. This tool to support open research is now available to authors publishing in BMC Biology, BMC Research Notes, BMC Neuroscience, BMC Plant Biology, BMC Evolutionary Biology, and BMC Genomics. In the coming months, more journals will be added to this list.
This new online data submission portal will definitely increase the support for open research and make the submission process easier for those authors who intend to submit articles to journals published by Springer Nature. This collaboration of Springer Nature with Figshare will significantly contribute to the increased support for open research and the development of similar open access tools.
