On Thursday 11th May we held our annual Figshare Fest! This edition was held in the UK at Manchester Museum for a special collaboration alongside the University of Manchester. We had attendees and speakers from organizations across the UK and Europe. It was an action-packed day for the Figshare community with presentations, interactive discussions and plenty of networking!
We had speakers from a number of universities and research institutions discussing their experiences with Figshare.
After an introduction from the event organizer, Laura Day, we kicked off the day with Claire Turner from Figshare discussing the steps that libraries can take to ensure compliance with funder mandates. Claire highlighted the growing requirement for international markets to make data more openly available and the forecast for the UK.
Our CEO Mark Hahnel gave us an overview of the roadmap for the year - this includes stronger integration between Digital Science products, particularly between Elements and Figshare. He discussed the steps taken to implement new feature requests and the many updates that took place throughout the past year.
Adrian Clark from Figshare gave a presentation on the Research Excellence Framework and the window of compliance to meet best practice. This was followed by Helen Newall of Edge Hill University who continued on the topic of the Research Excellence Framework and spoke about artist-researchers using Figshare as their platform of choice. She shared her Figshare author profile and discussed the many non-traditional research outputs which are shared by researchers in the art world how they benefit from being made openly available and discoverable across Figshare.
Watch Adrian Clark's presentation here.
Watch Helen Newall's presentation here.
The first presentation after lunch was by Sue Brown of Symplectic who discussed the integration of Elements with Figshare. She detailed the bi-directional support between the two systems which includes additional engagement monitoring privileges and automations to save on administrative efforts.
Following this, we heard from the biomedical research facility based in London, The Francis Crick Institute. Patti Biggs and Beth Montague-Hellen spoke on the steps the institute took to create their Figshare repository from scratch and how they approached the implementation of Symplectic Elements and its integration with Figshare.
Speakers from the University of Manchester, Bill Ayres, Clare Liggins, Eleanor Warren, Chris Gibson and Laura Turner, then shared their experiences from an administrators’ perspective in using Figshare. Their presentation discussed the Research Lifecycle Program, metadata integration and the value of alignment between teaching and learning staff when using Figshare.
We also heard from Dr. Paula Granados García and Dr. Orly Orbach of the Endangered Material Knowledge Programme. As an institute dedicated to the monitoring of material knowledge systems which are under threat, they discussed how Figshare has helped their organization to store documentation of processes and key data sets.
A PhD Candidate from the University of Manchester, James Bird, also shared his experience in using Figshare to shape his studies. He spoke about how open Research Data Management allowed him to structure his PhD to showcase his preparation, the experimental process and analysis points as he completed his studies. As a result, he was able to showcase a well-rounded project by utilizing Figshare’s integrations with Github and eLabFTW.
From the Open University, we heard a fascinating account from Isabel Chadwick, who discussed the impact of the covid-19 pandemic on open data sharing within the university. Her case study noted the shift which allowed marginalized communities to gain a voice by contributing to projects, in many cases using only phone technology.
Damon Strange from the University of Oxford spoke about their experiences of migrating content onto Figshare. His presentation highlighted some of the more intricate challenges which come from data migration and showed how their perseverance had a successful impact on their research.
As the sole member in the Research Management team, Aamir Hussain from De Montfort University had a need to increase efficiency of data management, and he found the solution with Figshare. He presented the challenges that came with implementation and engaging researchers in the caveats of their projects.
Presenting on behalf of Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC) was Vitalija Stepusaityte, who spoke about about the challenges they faced in implementing Figshare as their repository across multiple campuses with different research outputs.
The last presentation was from CEO of Symplectic and MD, Research Workflows for Digital Science, Jonathan Breeze. He discussed the synergy between Figshare and Symplectic, as well as their shared aims and the ways in which the products support each other. Jonathan presented exciting future plans and the product enhancements which are coming down the pipeline.
We closed the day with a word from Mark Hahnel to thank our speakers and attendees, before an evening of networking. Once again, we’d like to send our thanks to all those who attended and spoke at this years’ Figshare Fest.
Session recordings and presentations are available to view in the Figshare Fest collection here.
May 25, 2023 13:30
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