How do I access and use Figshare?
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What is Figshare?
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Benefits of using Figshare
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How to access Figshare
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Uploading data and metadata
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Licensing your data
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Reserve a DOI (Digital Object Identifier)
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Publishing data via Figshare
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Figshare Collections and Projects
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More information
What is Figshare?
Figshare is the University of Manchester’s supported institutional research data repository, managed by the Office for Open Research.
Figshare can be used to deposit and publish research data which is suitable for sharing openly and publicly, under an open licence, to enable others to freely access and reuse the data. It is available to all researchers at the University of Manchester (staff and PGRs) to publish their data openly.
If you need to control who will access your research data, rather than making it openly available, please see our Sharing research data page. We do not support controlled access to data via Figshare.
For further information on things to consider before sharing your data, please see our Sharing research data page and Best practice for managing your outputs on Figshare.
Benefits of using Figshare
Publishing data via Figshare helps to make your data outputs Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR).
Published outputs in Figshare:
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are provided with a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) which can be cited within other research publications, included on websites, shared via social media or in presentations;
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are discoverable via search engines, expanding the reach of your research;
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benefit from usage metrics to show views, downloads, citations and Altmetrics;
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will be preserved long-term.
Using Figshare to publish data openly can also fulfil funder or publisher requirements for data sharing.
How to access Figshare
To access Figshare visit figshare.manchester.ac.uk and log in using your university credentials.
We recommend enhancing your Figshare profile by adding your ORCID. To edit your profile, click the circle with your initials or image (in the top-right corner of the screen) and select ‘Profile’ from the drop menu. Further guidance is available from the Maximise your research profile guide.
Uploading data and metadata
Once you have logged in to Figshare you can upload your data and documentation files in your 'My data' area. Multiple files can be added to one data item, as needed, or you can organise your data items in Figshare using Collections or Projects (see below).
The edit page for your item will ask you to complete some metadata fields with information about the data. We recommend making this as detailed and descriptive as possible to help others find, understand and use your data. Your published data will be a citable research output, so you should think about it in as much detail as you might for publishing a journal article. For guidance on what to add to each metadata field see Adding or editing metadata and How to make the most out of your metadata.
All metadata fields can be edited after publication, but changes to certain fields (e.g. title, authors or files) will trigger a new version of the dataset. For more information see How versioning works.
You can save the record at any time using the ‘Save changes’ button, and you can return to it later. You can also preview the item, to see how it will be displayed once it’s published, by selecting ‘Preview item’.
Licensing your data
You will be asked to select a licence for your data. The licence will be set as default to CC BY 4.0 which allows others to download, share, and adapt your work. You can change the licence from the menu. For more information see How to choose a licence and Licensing data for reuse.
Reserve a DOI (Digital Object Identifier)
If you are not yet ready to publish the data (for example, you want to publish it at the same time as your journal article) click on ‘Reserve DOI’. This will provide you with the DOI for the data which you can put into your manuscript. For more information see How to publish a dataset at the same time as the associated paper.
Publishing data via Figshare
When you are ready to publish the data, click ‘Submit for review’. This will trigger a notification to the Office for Open Research to review the item for publication.
We will contact you before publishing if we have any recommendations or queries about the dataset.
Please note that the depositing user is responsible for ensuring that the data is suitable and ready for open publishing before submitting the data for review. You must ensure that you have permission (including any participant consent, where applicable) to upload and publish the data files, and that they don’t contain anything that should not be made public. You will be asked to confirm that the item can be made public, permanently available, and agree to the terms.
Figshare Collections and Projects
Within Figshare there are options to organise your data into Collections and Projects. For a summary see Comparing Project and Collection features.
Collections are a useful way of gathering together several published data items for a particular research project, publication, or event, and they receive a DOI at Collection level, which you can reference or cite in associated publications. There must be at least one published item within the Collection before you can publish the Collection. See Figshare’s Collections guide.
Projects is a space within Figshare where different members of the Figshare Project can upload data files. Each item within the Project can only be published by the person that has uploaded it. It is not necessary to use Projects to publish your data related to a research project. We recommend that any collaborative work takes place before files are uploaded to Figshare. Projects do not receive DOIs even if they are made public. See Figshare’s Projects guide.
If you use the Collection or Project function, we recommend that each data item within the Collection or Project has contextual metadata which enables the data item to be cited as a stand-alone research output.
More information
Figshare provides the following guides to support you to use the system effectively: