If there is one thing that the library and academic world has, it is a sense of community. Whilst working in this space for the best part of a decade, we have always found it be full of people who want to share ideas, time and projects. We have tried to echo this sentiment in the way we work and how we develop infrastructure. This post will talk about exactly that, the Figshare community - what we do, what we have and how you can join in!
Let’s start with the easy ones. We love talking to those interested in the open academic space, be it researchers, publishers, institutions or funders. Whoever you are, we’re always happy to share our experiences and answer any questions you may have. You can contact us and others in the community in so many ways - here’s some of our favourites
We also engage with the academic community with outreach. We’ve had over 10,000 listens of our podcast ‘School of Batman’. School of Batman is a podcast where we ask academics to fight crime using their research. From neuroscience to linguistics, academia is helping Batman save Gotham! You can tune in yourself whether it’s on Soundcloud, iTunes, Spotify, or of course Figshare. They’re on Twitter. You can participate too.
We have a Figshare Community on Slack where users from across the research community - including researchers themselves - come to learn from one another and speak to our team about product development, engagement, our API, and more. You can join our Slack community here.
We have Case Studies on Figshare users sharing their experience with open data:
We’ve just launched a new app store that highlights all the integrations and applications developed by the community. If we’ve left your app off the list, let us know at info@figshare.com.
We’ll also be running a competition soon to develop new applications and integrations. Watch this space.
For our Institutional Clients, we try to engage as often as possible - we’re always wanting to assist where we can, whilst being mindful of librarians’ busy schedules. There are several ways we connect throughout:
Some of these events are organised ad-hoc, some are based on feature releases or repository launches and our personal favourite is of course, our FigshareFests. We have held annual meet-ups for all clients over the last few years, in the USA, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands and Belgium. Dan Towns of Loughborough summed up beautifully the vibe of a FigshareFest after our most recent event in London, here.
Many of our team came straight out of academia, so we know that getting your own organisation on board with open access and open research is tough to do alone. As such, we have an army of academic Ambassadors! Ambassadors span across Figshare for Institutions, Figshare for Publishers, and figshare.com, delivering open science talks, participating in case studies, and starting conversations about data sharing at their institution.
If you or your organisation would like to join us in our discussions, feel free to jump into our Figshare Community Slack channel or just drop us an old-fashioned email at info@figshare.com. We love to share our ideas and research (we even have our own Figshare repository :)) - So let us know how we can help.
The open research community is so powerful. The many communities that overlap lift all in the space. We want to continue to be as open, as accommodating and as helpful as we can.
Feb 18, 2019 14:16
This is a reposted article from our blog, the original article can be found at:
https://figshare.com/blog/The_Figshare_Community/470