With institutions in the United States and Canada, the Figshare North American community is growing with a number of universities using Figshare for data, papers, theses, and more. They’re also leading the way on unique use cases for using the Figshare API and integrations with other library management systems.
Funding organizations that are part of cOAlition S are working to implement Plan S. Members of cOAlition S stipulate that any research they fund should be made available immediately through open access journals, platforms, or repositories. Figshare meets the Plan S required repository requirements:
Figshare also meets other strongly recommended criteria:
Recent webinar summary:
Making the curation workflow efficient for researchers and repository managers is a constant challenge. In this recent webinar, University of Arizona's Chun Ly and Fernando Rios discussed the data curation workflow they implemented for their data repository, ReDATA, available at arizona.figshare.com.
They discussed the best practices they follow for curation and software development, the strengths and weaknesses of doing curation in the Cloud, and how they have used the Figshare API for a semi-automated workflow.
The Python tool they developed is available on GitHub: https://github.com/UAL-ODIS/LD-Cool-P and you can view a recording of the webinar here: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.14730420.v1
Virginia Tech just launched a new data repository at https://data.lib.vt.edu/. The first thing to notice in this repository is that every dataset has a readme file that describes the files. The Library offers Data Services that help researchers format and describe their research outputs.
The University of Wyoming’s new repository (https://wyoscholar.uwyo.edu/) contains resources from across the campus. Along with ETDs, publications, and datasets, UW migrated state publications, undergraduate research outputs, and open educational resources into their Figshare instance.
Ryerson University’s institutional repository is now live at https://rshare.library.ryerson.ca/. It is primarily ETDs at the moment but also contains peer reviewed papers, presentations, and online resources.
Policy and compliance:
University faculties across North America are passing open access policies. The Coalition for Open Access Policy Institutions lists 95 full members. As of 2017, fourteen Canadian institutions had passed open access policies. If your institution is one of those, or if an OA policy is under discussion, your Figshare repository has multiple features to aid this workflow.
Here are a few examples of North American institutions that share open access articles through their Figshare repositories:
Policy: https://www.science.gc.ca/eic/site/063.nsf/eng/h_97610.html
The Canadian government has three large funding agencies that are collectively called the Tri-Agency. The Tri-Agency has been developing a research data management policy and there is a plan for incremental implementation: By Spring 2022 there will be a list of funding opportunities that require DMPs, by March 1, 2023 institutions will need to post their RDM strategies, and after assessing RDM strategies and with community feedback, they will phase in a data sharing requirement.
The new NIH policy for data management and sharing will go into effect January 25, 2023. It requires any NIH funded research to include a data management plan (DMP) and asks researchers to “maximize appropriate data sharing when developing” a DMP. In 2020, the NIH awarded over 60,000 grants. Without a doubt the new policy will spur an increase in requests for data sharing infrastructure at research institutions. A data capable institutional repository can save researchers time and provide rich opportunities for reporting and assessment. The Figshare platform meets the NIH guidelines for repositories and in fact has been used by the NIH itself.
Figshare Ambassadors are advocates for open research and open data. They are active in community events and conversations around these topics while benefitting from a network of other ambassadors in their region.
.png)
.png)
