Play the webinar
April 13, 2022
Figshare
Collaboration is a key component to academic research and innovation. Researchers need ways to collaborate on files both internally and externally. Research support staff and librarians need ways to collaborate with researchers when preparing material for the repository. This webinar will cover how Figshare Projects facilitate collaboration and how administrators can manage both records and storage using Projects.
Please note that the transcript was generated with software and may not be entirely correct.
0:04
Hello, everyone.
0:06
Um, gonna get started here in a couple seconds. I guess, just in case any last minute.
0:14
Joiners here.
0:30
All right.
0:30
well that's close to you know one minute past the top of the hour here, so I think I'm going to jump in and get going.
0:40
Thank you everyone for attending or if you're watching this later, thanks for clicking that play button. My name is Andrew McKenna-Foster.
0:48
I'm a product specialist with Figshare and in the next 30 minutes I'm going to be talking about how you can collaborate on the Figshare platform in Figshare?
1:00
If you have questions, put them into the question box that's part of the webinar software, or my e-mail is on the slide here.
1:09
You can always e-mail me whenever you like.
1:13
Before we jump into collaboration, I just wanted to share some of the upcoming webinars and this isn't even all of them there. There are other ones that I have not listed here, but, so, you know, in early May, I'm going to be talking about the Figshare API for librarians. Excited for that.
1:30
A week later we have a webinar on using the State of Open Data Survey to put the NIH policy on Data Management and sharing into practice, so that's going to be a really good one I think.
1:42
July, going to be talking about reporting and statistics and Figshare that'll be another one of these half-hour webinars.
1:48
Then you know, July onwards there A bunch of other webinars. More details will be coming out about. Things like working with batch records. We have a new tool that's being developed right now for that, talking about funder repositories. Going to be doing a webinar on the API for researchers, so lots to come, keep your eye out for invites to all of those.
2:09
Also, I want to mention that Figshare is 10 years old this year, which is really exciting. We have these really awesome shirts that I see up on the top right of the core slide here.
2:18
Um, and as conferences open up, we have, we're planning to be attending conferences in person this year.
2:25
Hopefully, long as all goes well. So if you're at a conference and you know we're there, please drop by, might be able to swing one of these cool Figshare T-shirts.
2:36
So today's webinar and collaboration is for everyone. So whether you're a Figshare dot com user. So you have a free account and you're sharing your data or other research outputs there. Or you're at an institution and you're a researcher or you're a librarian or curator whether using ... dot com or your, maybe your institution uses Figshare for its repository platform. You should.
3:01
No matter who you are, there should be something in this webinar for you.
3:06
And just quickly, to make sure we're all on the same page.
3:09
Figshare is a repository platform restoring, sharing, citing research outputs of all different types across disciplines.
3:16
And there, there are two ways that we offer this. So, one is Figshare dot com. That's where anyone can create a free account and start sharing their outputs.
3:25
Then institutions' research organizations, government agencies, publishers, funders, can license Figshare to have their own repository platform that they can operate, and all of these various repositories and Figshare dot com, or kind of like this Figshare universe. They're all accessible through Figshare dot com and I will be showing examples of using projects and collaborations in both of these cases.
3:52
So collaboration in Figshare revolves around the projects feature.
3:58
And projects are a collaboration space.
4:00
They allow commenting on items that are part of the project, they provide access to private items so you can share things privately there with other people in the project.
4:11
Projects can be public or they can just be totally private and project members just need a free Figshare account or an account with their institution.
4:21
If the institution is using Figshare So you can you can have collaborative projects with no matter what kind of Figshare account people have.
4:28
Just need an account.
4:31
I know this is a wall of text here but these are the five use cases that I'm going to cover today. I'm sure there are many more out there.
4:39
Side note, I'd love to hear about use cases that you have or things you use projects for. I'm always interested in hearing how, how people are using various features on Figshare.
4:50
But really quickly, I'm going to talk about how projects can connect researchers to researchers. Try the most obvious use case here. Collaborative research group can use it.
4:59
But also, how a researcher can can connect with a librarian or a curator to receive help in terms of curating or making their their outputs FAIR and then vice versa. How a librarian can offer to set up projects to help researchers that you might be affiliated with.
5:16
And no, this is true. Even if your institution doesn't have a Figshare repository for your institutional repository or Data repository, you can still use Figshare dot com for this kind of work.
5:28
And then at the end of the webinar, I'm going to talk about specific use cases for institutions that are using Figshare for their repository.
5:36
So one of those is to provide temporary access to an embargo item to students and researchers. So this is kinda like a special collections type use case.
5:46
I'll explain more later. Or you can even use projects at an institution to assist with the transfer of files and metadata.
5:53
From one, you know, from a researcher or student to maybe an admin account and I'll show you how that's done as well.
6:01
So I'm going to use a Sandbox instance today of Figshare kind of a demo version. two to be able to switch accounts and show all this stuff. If you're a Figshare dot com user, you may see some things that you're like, I don't see that in my account. And it's just because institutional versions of Figshare. Or had a little bit more features, especially administrative features and some other kind of add ons.
6:22
But I will, I will note, if, if something that I'm talking about is not available to Figshare dot com folks.
6:30
Before I jump into the sandbox though, I wanted to show you what it looks like on the public side, what projects look like these collaborative spaces look like on the public side.
6:38
This is Figshare dot com.
6:40
Kind of the Portal two, Any all fiction items.
6:44
I'm just, I click Enter into the Search box there, and it's going to load all the objects in Figshare almost six million now, and I'm going to select projects on the facets over there on the left.
6:57
So, there are over 4000 projects publicly, available on Figshare, that probably lots of other private projects, and we can see a lot of these have to do.
7:05
It's just, you know, grouping together, research outputs rather than clicking on one of these, never know what you're gonna get. I've opened some previously.
7:14
So, Wikipedia talk is this nice project here.
7:20
This is basically like a landing page or this research. So that's one.
7:24
got, you know, nice use of projects is giving your research a place to live on the Internet, Where people can find it in and see all the various things that are part of it. Just a quick kind of, lay out here. Have a title, you know, who's published, this project and available?
7:41
Description area, we can see the members of the project over here, and we can see the views. How many people have viewed this project.
7:48
And we can actually cite all the items in this project, if we wanted to using whatever format we needed, that clicking this Site, All items, just download, say, a text file, all the citations.
8:00
This project has four public items, and again, there could be a lot of many more private items that are not public that these three people are sharing together.
8:13
If there are a ton of items down here, we can search them. We can sort them by relevance, number of citations, et cetera.
8:20
So, lots of, um, ways that end users can interact with your project.
8:25
Just a few other examples.
8:27
PHD thesis, student, no, use the project to share all the items of their data, and it looks like some figures associated with their dissertation.
8:39
Uh, a nice way to provide kind of a landing page for that. Perhaps, they use this project as a way to, you know, share with their advisor, to say, Hey, you know, check this out, This is all looks good. What do you think you want to make any comments on it.
8:52
And another last example is, you know, here's an example of just a bunch of research outputs that are all part of one research project. This was shared really recently on April 11th. And so, again, data, failures, and all that. So, this is the public side.
9:07
But a lot of the magic happens behind the scenes on the private side. That's where all the collaboration takes place.
9:14
So, show you that, I'm going to use this sandbox instance of fix your favorite college from the movie Animal House, and in this case, you can see Faber's has a pretty strong astronomy department going here, which is great, so I'm going to login. First off, as a researcher, so just a user of the repository.
9:35
This is what it would look like if you were.
9:37
If you're a Figshare dot com user.
9:41
Um, and so, Lewis says, who have logged in as has a bunch of items.
9:46
Some are public, this one is a draft item, can even zoom in a little bit here, This one doesn't even have enough metadata to be a draft yet.
9:56
And we see that there's a tab for projects. So this is the collaborative area and immediately see that Louis is apparently a pretty good collaborator, easier to work with, maybe as part of several projects.
10:07
Um, and there are two sets of projects, so the Louis has been invited to collaborate, or has created these collaborative projects here.
10:17
Then Louis has also been invited as a viewer on this other project. So you can control, you have a little bit of control of how much access people have.
10:25
Basically, what this means is that Lewis can view all the items in this ongoing campus showcase project, but can't add anything, but Lewis can add any items or records to these projects up here.
10:39
So the first use case that I want to talk about, I'm gonna go back to my slides here.
10:44
Um, it's applicable to everybody and it's connecting researchers to researchers.
10:50
So here we have a project that I've already started.
10:52
And it's actually public project inter-departmental collaborative projects.
10:56
I click on that, and we see that. I'm going to show the details as well. So there are two collaborators here: Lewis and Lazlo.
11:04
There's a little bit of a description and the chart started sharing items. Lewis has put into public items. Laszlo has put up what is supposedly a really big data file in here.
11:14
It's not public.
11:17
Typically, Lewis would have no way to see this big file unless Laszlo made it public but because their projects projects feature exists, Lazlo adds it to the project and now Lewis is going to be able to access this file.
11:29
And I'll show you that just like this. So, it's actually not a really big file. It's just an image. But you can imagine that, you know, maybe that's a massive data file, or something. And there's some metadata down here. Perhaps this is getting prepared to make public as part of a publication.
11:47
one really important thing to note is that Lewis can access this private record.
11:52
From lazlo, but cannot actually edit this specific record.
11:57
Louis cannot edit the metadata down here. Can't edit the file itself.
12:01
Close this.
12:03
Um, Lewis can download that file, can, you know, use it for analysis, on lose his machine, but cannot actually change it.
12:14
And same is true for Laszlo. Laszlo cannot make any changes to Louis' records. This is important just in terms of, you know, kinda like chain of custody, making sure no changes were made without the owner actually knowing what's going on.
12:27
However, in a project, you can make comments on other people's items so Louis can say this. This looks great.
12:34
Uh, well, you know, whatever, I think we're ready to publish it, ready to make it public, and can comment there and it, and, it sits there. And you can also comment for the project as a whole, so, there. So, when people think of collaboration, you know, it's obvious. unlike Google Drive, Type Collaboration Figshare is really, you know, really aimed at making things publicly available.
12:54
And also, making sure that the owner of these, these files knows exactly what's going on with them.
13:01
So, you can leave comments.
13:03
You can download files from other people on a project, You can't make changes to their actual project's items.
13:10
There has been discussion of adding that, but not anytime in the near future.
13:18
OK, so the other thing I wanted to mention, this is Louis, his project, and so if I just wanted to add more people, you know, this is inter departmental. Maybe Louis wants to add someone from another university, maybe someone from another country. As long as they have a Figshare account, they can be added to this project.
13:36
So we can just search by name, let's search my name.
13:39
And this is a, since this is a sandbox and since we just have a bunch of folks loaded who use Figshare but lots of different Andrews.
13:50
Some are related to Carnegie Mellon University.
13:52
Um, and, or I'll search than, for example.
13:56
So we can just add folks and what would happen is, by adding them, we can choose if they're a viewer or collaborator and add members.
14:03
So an invitation now has been sent to this person's Figshare account and if they accept, they can start collaborating with us.
14:14
And just to note, we can add a title here, Add more to the description, we can add funding, this looks up the funding record and dimensions. We can add that and it will be linked from our project page. If we make it public, then folks will be able to see that.
14:31
So, I will save.
14:35
What do those invitations look like? They show up under your activity tab.
14:38
And so let us click into activity here and we see that Lewis has been invited to a project. And so, I will join that project, OK, great, we're going to see that a little bit later.
14:51
So, that was, oh, and so we will now see this project has been added to Louis's account here.
15:00
So, the next thing I want to talk about is a researcher who maybe wants some help from a curator or a librarian.
15:08
Um, how to connect with them, and then also vice versa. How a librarian can make can use projects to connect with the researchers.
15:16
So, from the researcher perspective, Lewis has this data from my publication and will preview it. It's not public, it's It would be difficult to give access to someone else. This way, he could use private links, that is another option.
15:30
But yes, it's maybe complicated, there's data, there's code, there's a readme text, that's great!
15:35
An image started to add some metadata down here, how can we get help from a librarian for them?
15:43
So, Lewis can just start a project.
15:47
It's helped me with this.
15:52
Then, uh, OK, I'll just leave it as an individual thing. This is, um, groups, or as we'll see later, only available for, for institutions.
16:03
But I'm going to add, in this case, you know, this could be any administrator, a librarian, or curator, whether they have a Figshare dot com account or an edge or institution account.
16:13
I'm going to choose this person, collaborator. I'll add members. Now they got an invite.
16:19
And then I can go back, oops, I would like to save the project. I always have to save it.
16:26
I can go back to my data and I can now add this record to that project.
16:34
Please help me with this.
16:36
And there we go. It's been moved in there.
16:38
And as we'll see, we'll see what that looks like from the curator site. For later, I'm actually also going to add a different item to a different project or leave louis's account.
16:49
I'm going to add this to Astronomy Curation Project, ooops.
16:56
And I'd have to redo that a little bit later.
16:59
Try one more time. There's probably something to do with.
17:05
Because we have review turned on. So I can, I'll come back to that later.
17:10
So review is turned on for this repository, and I can't quite add that to the project yet.
17:16
OK, so we're still talking about the researchers share this complicated dataset with the curator. How what does that look like from the curator side?
17:26
So I'm gonna log out And I'm going to log back in as that admin person who I'm using as a curator.
17:38
OK, so first of all, we see that the the administrator has, or this Curator has an invite to Lewises Project during this project.
17:51
And that will now show up here, and the curator can come in here and say. Oh, great, Louis has added this. This dataset. I'll take a look at this.
18:00
I could download all of these files and check them and provide input, you know, maybe the Readme text, need some more work. It offer things in the, in the file itself.
18:12
I can look at the metadata, and depending on what, how much work needs to be done, I can then leave some comments here.
18:22
So as, uh, I'll add a new item width changes or something, whatever the case may be.
18:35
And we can use this a little collaborative place, and when Lucy Brady Lewis can publish that, that record.
18:42
OK, I'm just checking my notes here. Make sure we have everything going. So from the administrator side or a curator side or a librarian side.
18:52
To this project page, you could use projects to create a space where you can invite researchers in, and then they can help. They can add items, and you can give assistance to them as they're preparing things for publication.
19:05
In this case, here's this Holly Filled Research Group, Publication Prep. So we go in here, we see that, this has quite a few, well, I'm not quite a few as three other members. Maybe it's part of this Polyfills research team. They've added a few items ones public ones drafted yet again, I can make comments on here. I can download these files and I can view them. Even if it's a draft format, I can still see everything and download it. So another way to, to help researchers make their outputs as FAIR as possible and in compliance with any policies they're facing.
19:42
All right.
19:46
So, the, what I've just gone over is, is applicable to fix your dot com users and institutional Figshare users. You can do that with any, just a free account. You can basically do everything that I just showed you and went over.
20:02
Another example, uh, that I want to talk about now is something that's really specific to institutions.
20:10
So those who have Figshare as a institutional repository platform and that's providing temporary access to an embargoed item for students or researchers. So bear with me. Here's the scenario.
20:23
I'm gonna look in my data.
20:26
I have a record here, Diary 181840. Perhaps, this account that I'm in is, the account that holds all these special collection items.
20:37
I can view this, oops, I don't want to edit it.
20:42
I want to, I can do it this way.
20:44
There we go.
20:45
So this is what the public sees of this item, It's embargoed.
20:49
I could add like an e-mail address here, something for people to, to contact us. If they wanted to access the actual files. The metadata that was public, this is findable, everyone can know that they were college, has this, this item here, maybe images from a journal, it seems like, or a diary.
21:06
So it's final, but you still need to have permission to actually see the files itself.
21:13
How can you do that? Especially if, say, a professor is like, my class is doing this project, I need them, I would like them to have access to some of these special collections files.
21:23
Well, as the owner, you know, the, maybe the curator of all these, these files, I can say no problem. We'll set up a project.
21:31
And we can add all your students to the project, and they can view these things temporarily. So I've set up a project.
21:37
So 378, go in here and view the details, so it involves Louis and a student, and I can actually see more details.
21:47
So I've added Lewis as the professor. This is the invitation list accepted earlier, and I've added this person, April Ludgate as a viewer, perhaps a student, and there's some directions in the description box.
22:00
And if I go back, I can now add, wow, whatever files I want, to this project and make them accessible, viewable to those students?
22:11
Here we go.
22:17
So now for anybody who's part of this project, will be able to view this file, and see through the end of the embargo.
22:24
So, now I can view the actual image itself. I could even download it, if I want. Hopefully, there'll be a more restrictive license, if need be, than what I have here, maybe copyrighted or something.
22:38
But the point is, I can now access this from the project, and all the students will be able to do the same.
22:45
Anyone who's part of this, you might be asking, well, like, the class has 85 students, I don't wanna have to go through, and like, you know, find all of them.
22:53
That's where the Figshare API can help you. I'm going to click over to the Figshare API documentation.
22:59
There's a whole Projects' section here.
23:01
You can create projects, add the projects, and scroll down on the left side of the screen.
23:06
You can invite project members through the API, so you could, you know, how do this multiple ways. But you could add a bunch of folks to a project.
23:16
All you need is their e-mail, and the user ID.
23:22
So, if you are at an institution, you can get that user ID from your from the user report, and you can also get their e-mail address from that same user report.
23:33
So, there are ways you can kind of add a lot of people to a project all at once.
23:42
OK, so my final example here, keeping the eye on the time, and I hope it works. There's always gonna be one glitch in the demo.
23:51
Is transferring items from one person to another.
23:58
So I'm gonna go, rather than logging in and out of accounts, I'm just going to use my administrator power to impersonate an account. So, going into the astronomy admin account.
24:11
And this account has created this astronomy curation project to fail to add something to earlier.
24:17
But there's something very important here.
24:19
This is a group project and the difference here is that group projects use institutions' storage, an individual projects, Use the, each person's storage. So, in a group project, anything added to this project is going to be stored with institution storage. There's individual, anything Lewis added would still just be using Lewis a storage and so on.
24:42
And what this means is that if I remove someone from this project?
24:48
So if I remove Lewis anything, Lewis has added to that project will actually stay with me and I'm going to try one other I'm going to try, bear with me. I'm going to try one other thing. I'm gonna try adding something from someone else's account.
25:03
So, this, I'm gonna go in as just Bazel here, Do a little magic, try to add an item.
25:14
I'm going to move this, too, See the Works Astronomy Curation Project, OK, so, like, can't do that.
25:23
Yeah, OK.
25:25
But what I can do is go into projects and start a start, an item here, just a little bit slower.
25:31
But, so, I've gone into the astronomy curation project. I mean, just bazel's account, and I'm gonna say, this is the metadata only record. This is a Title item. I'll just give it a category Astrobiology.
25:45
Say it changes. I could add a bunch of files here. Whatever I need to do. So now that exists in this Project.
25:54
Leave this account.
25:58
And I'm gonna, we'll back in as that astronomy, and so what we're doing here is we're going to see astronomy admin.
26:08
uh, is going to gain control of that item. So there, we have that project again.
26:13
We see the item item added by Gess, Bazel, I cannot edit this so I can view it, but I can't edit it. I don't have any control over it. I can just, if there were files like a download them if I needed to.
26:28
What I can do and the use case here is, if you managed to graduate student working on this, like, astronomy data or it's a graduate student in a PI's lab, you can. And you want that, after that graduate student leaves. You want those items kind of stick around where you can edit them easily.
26:44
I can just remove.
26:46
Yes, there's Bazel.
26:48
Seen this.
26:52
And now, this item now has a gear next to it.
26:55
So I can edit it, and I actually own this item now.
26:59
Even though just added it, and I can actually see it in my, um, my data right now. So I can come in now and I can change whatever I need to. I own this item.
27:09
It'll still be connected to Jess. She did all the work curating it. It'll still show up in our profile, but it's a little bit easier from the administration view. I can now have control over this item.
27:23
So, I'm gonna end it there. If you have questions, please feel free to e-mail me.
27:30
again, if you have other ways that you use projects, I'd love to hear about them.
27:36
I'm always interested in how folks are using Figshare.
27:39
Can e-mail me, andrew@figshare.com, or you can just e-mail info@figshare.com.
27:45
Want to thank you all again for attending the webinar, And I hope to see you at future webinars.
27:50
If there are questions, I will be happy to answer them.
27:56
Thanks, Andrew.
27:58
There's one question that came in around when you were looping the librarian in So you created a new project and then put the new project into the existing project. I think there was just a bit of confusion about what had happened there.
28:16
Can you can't add a project or project?
28:19
So maybe just a bit of clarification on what you did during that process. Yeah. Sorry for that confusion.
28:26
So, I'm in the, the kind of admin or a curator account right now.
28:30
But it for this step. It doesn't matter.
28:32
It's the same if you're a curator or a researcher.
28:35
You can I either create a new project or use an existing project.
28:41
And I think this is going to answer the question. So, we see that Lewis has added this item.
28:45
So that you can't create a project within a project.
28:47
But as the curator, you know, maybe I downloaded some files, and I want to re upload them, so that Lewis can download them.
28:56
Um, I can move things from my, my data, so I can move this object.
29:04
I just selected it here, and I'm going to move it into, um, this project.
29:13
So now it's part of Lewis says Project.
29:17
Lewis will be able to access this, download it. Whatever post needs to do with it.
29:23
Um.
29:24
I can also remove it. Remove this item from this project if I needed to.
29:29
I hope that answered the question, and made it clear.
29:32
Megan, maybe you have better insight on if I actually did them.
29:37
Think to the person who asked, let us know if, if not, we'll have another gap.
29:45
There's a question around, Do you have to be an admin to repay someone for a project or can another user in the admin group who is a collaborator on the project, do that as well?
29:58
Uh, you should think only the owners, only the owner can do that.
30:04
So, for example, because I am in this project that Lewis shared with me as the curator, I don't have any way to edit the project. The only thing I can do is leave the project myself.
30:17
So because I can't edit the project, I cannot go in and remove people from that project.
30:22
You have to be the project owner, Project creator, to make those kind of changes.
30:33
Great, thanks, Angie, Look like there any other questions that have come to you?
30:40
Mmm hmm.
30:45
Just a clarification on that one, so the question was about an item, Can a user remove someone from an item?
30:51
I know that one, as you're trying to do, you know, as long as you own the item, so in this case, I I own this item, I'm the only one who can make changes to it.
31:04
I can add and remove people to it so I can add Louis' as an author to this item, and Lewis will show up as an author to add somebody to it, as an author, to an item. It doesn't matter if they're part of the project or not.
31:23
That's specific to this item, they're there, you know, directly involved, But, with the data, they don't have to be part of this project to be added as a author.
31:38
But, if and if that didn't answer the question, please e-mail me in.
31:42
Happy to, happy to walk through more, more with you.
31:48
Thanks, Angie.
31:50
Yeah, I think that's it.
31:53
Great.
31:54
Thank you all, again.
31:57
Hope to see you at future webinars.
32:01
Thanks, anyway.