Figshare for Publication Plain Language Summaries (PLSs) and Supplemental Data

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Hello everyone, good morning, afternoon, evening, wherever you are.

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My name is Megan Hardeman and the Product Marketing Manager at Figshare and I'm absolutely delighted to be joined by Dan Valen who's the Head of Strategic Development at Figshare and Angela Sykes, the Content and Education Director at Pfizer.

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We're going to be talking about using Figshare for publication, plain language summaries and supplemental data today. And a few bits of housekeeping before I pass it over to Dan and the first is that this webinar is being recorded and we'll send it around all of the registrants afterward. And if you want to have a watch again.

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And the second piece of information is that there is a question box in the go to Webinar control panel, where you can ask questions at any point during the webinar.

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Or you can put them in the chat box, if you prefer another some time at the end, where I would be happy to answer any questions.

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All right, I think that's everything for me. I'll hand over to you, Dan.

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Thank you, Megan, And thanks so much to everyone for joining us on the webinar today. As Megan noted, my name is Dan Valen and I'm the Head of Strategic Development at Figshare. And I couldn't be more excited to talk with everyone about Figshare and to also hear from Angela ...

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in just a bit on how Pfizer is using Figshare to better support their sharing of plain language summaries, supplemental material, greenaway content and more. But first I'd like to provide a brief overview of Figshare for those of you who aren't as familiar with the platform as well as one of our main enterprise offerings that being Figshare for institutions.

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So a Figshare has been around for a little while. We're actually celebrating our 10 year anniversary this year, as this slide helpfully points out for those that aren't super familiar.

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Figshare is a cloud based platform that allows researchers, in this case authors, and administrators such as editors, science, communications, leads, etc. to showcase published material coming from their organization.

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It's essentially a publishing platform for researchers and organizations alike.

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And Figshare was actually founded out of academia when our founder and CEO was finishing his PHD in stem cell biology. And during the course of his PHD, he generated over nine gigabytes of data, of which he called five static images that were ultimately used in three journal publications. And that's kind of actually how we got our name ... denotes that figure one, figure to figure three that you might find in a journal article.

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And today, that name can be a bit misleading as we have support to handle and visualize everything from large dataset submissions, to preprints, to software and code and to items like some of what we're here to talk about today, not being plain language summaries.

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So essentially, Figshare is a way to publish track and get credit for what can loosely be referred to as non traditional research objects. And I joined way back in 20 14 with the launch of our first Figshare, enterprise offerings, feature for institutions and Figshare for publishers. And we're now working today to support over 125 different organizations globally. I think that number actually may be close to 250.

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And if any of this sounds familiar, and you're wondering about the connection with digital science fiction, it's actually a part of Digital Science, which is a technology company, and portfolio of individual tools that provide solutions to cover and support all stages of the research life cycle. So if you've heard of, say, Dimensions. And they're 106 million publications index therein.

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And 1.2, I think it is billion citations tracked.

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Figshare is in that same portfolio of companies. And it's actually that relationship that's enabled all of the tools in the portfolio to really partner and exciting ways. So for example, we actually use dimensions to track and display citations, a Figshare content that appear in the academic literature and that is shown on the item level of the Figshare record And there's also a number of other integrations. Metric being another great example that if you'd like to learn more about, please do get in touch after the webinar.

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So I've been throwing out a lot of buzzwords around research objects and sharing and I also, I often find it easiest to talk about Figshare by highlighting some of the communities that we support. And this is an overview of some of the main ones. And a few of you, on here, I've already mentioned, but really we act as a publishing platform and repository for organizations such as the NIH, the University of Oxford, or the Public Library of Science.

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Plus, as well as the hundreds of thousands of researchers and authors have published content on Figshare dot com. And all these folks use Figshare in slightly different ways which really speaks to the flexibility and utility of the platform.

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Also special shout out to Figshare Plus, which is our newest B to C offering, and not our newest streaming service. Unfortunately, everyone seems to be launching a Plus version these days, but Figshare plus serves to support researchers looking to publish big data and to also adhere to best practices dictated by the space.

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And it's really just another example of how, by supporting everything from supplementary material too, big data, to pre prints and working with different research organizations and funders and academic publishers, we've really ensured a level of best practice and compliance when it comes to publishing research.

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Whoops, so I'd like to quickly focus on Figshare for institutions here and this is an example of the junior research campuses Figshare portal Engineering is a part of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

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And they actually have their own Open Science policy which is pictured here on the left and are using Figshares to adhere to their own policy.

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So, who doesn't love an example of an organization in putting their money where their mouth is, or dog fooding, for lack of a better term. And ... actually uses the platform to publish standalone data, as well as data underlying formal journal publications from their researchers, often in compliance, not only with their own policies, but also data availability requirements from the publisher. So some of the key tenants of Figshare for institutions are highlighted here that is the ability to showcase content coming out of your organization in a branded, white labeled portal. Ensure everything that is published has relevant, persistent identifiers associated with the published items, such as DOI’s,

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as well as relevant metadata, so that those published items can be indexed and tracked and discoverable across the scholarly ecosystem.

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So, being cloud, a cloud based platform, we're constantly providing improvements to the infrastructure and rolling them out for all of our clients.

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Ensuring all the policies and best practices for the publication of research and management of data are adhered to, and it really helps that we work with a number of the funders and publishers who are issuing those policies. And being a global company.

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We also have to comply with those policies set forth by those organizations, as well as a number of countries worldwide.

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And so, this, of course, benefits, researchers and authors, as we can meet them, where they are, both from a workflow standpoint and from a policy standpoint, and that's really the ultimate goal of a tool like Figshare for institutions, really empowering organizations to better publish and showcase and track their, their research outputs.

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And, of course, that leads us to what we'll be talking about today, how Figshare supporting medical affairs teams and their goals for distributing research. And this screen grab and link to our new knowledge portal page on the different use cases we've seen in pharmaceutical organization. So you can check it out following the link below, and I encourage you all to really take a look, because it highlights the different ways Figsharemight be able to help your organization or meet a specific use case that you're trying to tackle around scientific communication.

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And so with that brief overview, I wanted to thank you all again for joining us today, and here's a look at the public Pfizer portal, which I will hand over to Angela to speak to.

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Thank you very much, Dan, and and thank you Megan for giving me the opportunity to present today. Let me just pull up my slides.

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Can you see the slides?

8:45

Perfect. Thank you. So yeah, Pfizer is actually very happy to work with Figshare and we're thrilled to have this opportunity to speak about the Figshare portal that we launched last year.

9:00

So it actually all started in plain language summaries. So, back in 2018, the College of Business Units at Pfizer did an out of publication plain language summary pilot, where they developed abstract plain language summaries for Congress publications, all the audio quality Congress's that took place for over an 18 month period. And, we took the learnings from that pilot and develop an enterprise wide publication, plain language summary guidance, which put controls in place for the development of both abstract and manuscript plain language summaries. And that enterprise wide guidance was implemented in February of 2020, and we strongly encourage all the publication teams at Pfizer to develop plain language summaries whenever appropriate.

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And then last July of last year, that guidance became part of our company wide standard operating procedure, and we saw a huge uptake in the development of PLS is across the organization.

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And where we had some difficulty sometimes with starting journals would allow a publication of a PLS, but they just didn't have the infrastructure built it into their website to publish a plain language summary. So the types of plain language summaries that we primarily publish are standalone, TLS is they're usually an infographic. There are a few pages long. And they're separate than the actual manuscript, so they're not embedded within the public within the published manuscript, sub journal's publisher, the supplemental material. Others such as ... will have a link in the manuscript itself that you can click on. And it takes you to the journal, Figshare a platform to speak to our platform or the PLS is housed. So, when we saw that, we thought, well, perhaps as an opportunity for Pfizer to develop our own Figshare for us out so that we can publish plain language summaries by the journal.

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The journal of which a manuscript is being published, agreed that the PLS was appropriate, but they just didn't have the infrastructure themselves publish that PLS.

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So that's how the idea first came to us.

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So, the first thing we did was that in, in 2020 we developed Figshare use cases. So we thought the first use case was publication of plain language summaries. But we thought the portal is so flexible, as Dan said, that we could use it for other use cases. I'll talk about what those are in the subsequent slide. And we built the use cases, and then we reached out to legal to get their input and approval out to our, our leadership.

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So that was a step one, which took place between Q 2, Q 3 of 2020.

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Once we got that legal, leadership approval, we went on and developed our user and functional requirements. So we worked very closely with our business technology partners to identify what we needed Figshare to be able to do for us so exempt, for example. We need to upload different types of files. We wanted users to be able to download those files.

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We want you to be able to, may have some files where the access was embargoed and only accessible to certain users. So for each of our use cases, we had very detailed views and functional requirements.

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We share those functional requirements with Figshare, and then, based on that, we developed and executed our scope of work at the end of 2020.

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And then we were given access to the stage and platform in Figshare, where a few thousand users with admin access learned how to use the site. We would be trained on the site. We tested them built various templates. And then in 22 July 2021, we were ready to launch our Figshare portal.

12:53

So these are the three use cases that we're using Figshare for. Share the Figshare portal as a centralized location for sharing publication related materials. So, three use cases, a plain language summary, somebody mentioned, and these plain language summaries, it's an example of one of our published PLS is here.

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These plain language summaries are only from manuscripts, not for abstracts off of Congress.

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Abstracts are only for published manuscripts, in cases where the journal allows the publication of PLS, but doesn't have the capability to publish the PLS themselves.

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Our second use case is a posting of supplemental materials associated with published manuscripts.

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As you are aware, more and more journals are requiring that, we provide additional supplemental materials, data files, tables, … and its codes, the codes used for generating the data, things like that.

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Ours that we provide them for publication alongside the published manuscript.

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But the journals themselves do not host these materials in certain cases, and there are a multitude of websites that journals approved for post and these materials publicly...

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And we're getting more and more of these requests and that each time you have to go through all of the potential websites that could be used for posting the supplemental materials, Some of the websites had very complicated requirements for posting materials.

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So, we thought that Figshare was a good option to have a consistent approach for posting supplemental materials associated with ... published manuscripts. It's a simple system to use.

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We're able to host all the size of supplemental materials in one location, and we have the ability to post and manage that process ourselves.

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So that is our second use case.

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And the third use case is the posting of green open access manuscripts.

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The examples I have here isn't actually a green open access, because we haven't managed to do any of those yet. But, as you know, certain journals do allow authors to post a green, open access version of a published manuscript on the authors, institutional website.

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So far, we've only seen that done, the academic institutions, but the majority of our publications have Pfizer authors, so we're hoping that will eventually get to the stage where the journals will allow green open access. Will allow us to post green open access versions of manuscripts open access, on the side, the Figshare, or when there are by the authors.

15:43

And open access is a very, it's a big goal for Pfizer. The publications management team has a goal of publishing 95% of our manuscripts open access, and, as of last year, would achieve that 86% of published manuscripts available open access. So we're hoping that we can employ green open access posted on Figshare to increase that number even more.

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We took a staged approach to the approval and implementation of Figshare.

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In Stage one, we did an analysis of journal and industry Figshare portals.

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As Dan mentioned, some journals, such as … use Figshare, for posting of material. So, we took a look at their platforms and also it related industry platforms such as Open Pharma.

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So we, so how do they post materials, what kind of information metadata do they have associated?

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And we use that as a basis of the, of developing the requirements for the ... report out.

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And then we, we built those use cases, we presented our requirements, and then we obtained our leadership and legal buy in.

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In the second stage of the process, we partnered with our business technology partners to develop, use functional requirements for each use case. I already went over that a bit, but the each use case, we said what, we, what our requirements were. So we had to have metadata that was publicly available. We have to be able to upload different file types. We wanted the ability to, to embargo certain data. We wanted to be able to view metrics and downloads views and in terms of geography. So we built those functional use requirements for each of our individual use cases.

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We also worked with the ... Data Security Group to up to screen and approve the Figshare portal and then we executed our Scope of Work.

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We then went on to design the phase of Figshare portal which I'll show you on the next slide.

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We gave access to the stage environment where we played around with building different templates for each of our use cases. We learn how to post to review different materials.

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We also consulted with legal to get there, to get them approved by the disclaimer language to include on the site, and B, found out what type of copyright license, so all the materials that we post, the CC by NC ND license. So everything is free to view, but not necessarily free to use it if it's for commercial purposes.

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And then we developed a very detailed advisor, Figshare user guide so that our internal colleagues know how to upload, review, and approve materials for posting on the website.

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And then, last year, we finally launched the portal.

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This is what the Figshare site looks like. It is a Pfizer branded site. And we, all the materials that we post, are the three different groups.

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So we have our open and being open access manuscripts, plain language summaries, and supplemental materials.

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We have the ability to curate what information is made available and to whom.

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So I'll go a bit more into that and show you how data are embargoed and how users can access requests to them by the data. Figshare allows upload any file type. So you can upload PDFs, Word documents, Excel files, and videos, and so on. And then it also has a dashboard with detailed metrics.

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So views, downloads and citations, and this is the link to the Figshare portal.

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Each document that we post, those required content that must be so metadata that has to be associated with each of these records.

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But this is an example off plain language summary. If I play now with somebody that's posted on the porthole, every document must have a title.

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Everything that's posted on Figshare has a DOI, so unique Digital Object Identifier, and that DOI can be added to the publication that that the PLS or the Supplemental Materials are associated with.

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You have to provide the author name, so the author names, or the needs of the authors of the underlying publication.

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There's a brief description about the content.

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So, here, we say that the Figshare page contains a plain language summary of the manuscript with this title.

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And we make it clear that this plain language summary is not peer reviewed, and was not reviewed, or approved by the journal limit. Your manuscript was published.

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So even though the publisher of the article does allow the posting of the PLS on the side, the Figshare portal, the journal is not involved in the review and approval of the PLS. So you want to make that very clear for all of the readers.

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There's a funding disclosure, so we disclose that the study was funded by Pfizer.

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If medical writing support was provided by one of our publication vendors, that is disclosed on the landing page, become relevant disclaimer language. If it is PLS product related, is that chronic approved for the indication that discussing the plain language summary.

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The PLS includes a citation of the underlying publication and the direct link back to that publication. So the reader of the TLS can just click on that link in the posting, and it takes a directed to the published manuscript online.

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There's also a link to the clinical trials dot gov posting if it's if it's TLS is a study related PLS. and then we also have keywords associated that publication. So this helps users to find the PLS in a search engine. So TLS, what all the posts I'm Figshare are eventually indexed in Google Scholar. So it's very important that we have the appropriate keywords associated with each of our, our postings, and then, as I mentioned, there's also the copyright license information.

22:01

I mentioned the every posting on Figshare has a DOI. And we're able to add that DOI. If the journal agrees to the publisher, we are able to add that DOI to the published manuscript. So, this is an example of an article that was published and be posted the supplemental data on the size of Figshare portal, so that, on the Figshare part, we have the code that was used for the generation with the data, and we also have some associated supplemental data files. And here, undercoat availability within the published manuscript there is that the DOI that links a reader directed to Figshare portal.

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So, if someone clicks on that DOI, it takes them to the Figshare portal, where you can see the supplemental data, and then you click on that, and then the Figshare record entry will open up.

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The supplemental data files are here at the top of the page, and then you have all the additional information, as I mentioned, here, the title of the manuscript that it's associated with, the needs of the authors, a description of what is post it here, and then there's a link back to the published manuscript.

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If you scroll further down, there will be the funding disclosure and also the link to the relevant study, clinical trials dot gov.

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Figshare also has the ability to embargo content.

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So with that same publication, the journal has requested that we posted individual participant level data. Now, we do not post entire dataset on Figshare.

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So we have a whole different system, if some independent researcher wants access, to an independent study dataset, Figshare is not where we provide that, and we have a different system that we use for that.

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But if there's a limited amount of individual patient level data that's associated with the manuscript, and the publisher requires that we make that information available, we do post that material on feature, but because it's individual patient level data, it is embargoed.

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So what you will see in the embargoed content Figshare records, is all the metadata.

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So you'll see a description of what these data are with the manuscript. Again, that's the danger that the data are related to.

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And then there's a link at the top to request access to the files. So if somebody wants access to these files, they have to request that. You click on that link.

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This access request box will open up, and the requester will have to provide the research, scientific, rationale, and what do they want to do? How are they going to use a data, Are their qualifications, and so on.

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And their e-mail address is automatically populated when they open this box and then they have to provide some details on their request.

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That requests for access to the data is then sent to Pfizer.

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We review the requests and if it's approved, then we will execute a data use agreement with the requester and then we will send them a private link to the data on Figshare. And then they'll have the ability to view and download the data directly from Figshare. But we do not do that without a data use agreement being put in place.

25:32

And it's been successful, so, you know, the site was launched in July of last year. It took a while to get things up and running to increase awareness of the site across the organization. We published our first record on Figshare in December of last year. We currently have 10 records posted or plain language summaries and six supplemental materials.

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two of those have embargoed files, and so far we've seen three requests for access and embargo data.

26:04

I believe that all of those requests have been approved and we're in the process of putting the data use agreements in place, And we've achieved a lot of views and downloads.

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So, plain language summaries, When I checked on March 11th, we had a total of 539 views and 127 downloads.

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As far as, our six supplemental materials, the … of 622 views and 84 downloads … for those embargoed data files which haven't yet been downloaded. So really we're very, very happy with how things are going and I mean the system is very easy to use and it's definitely been a success. And we're hoping that we'll have this continued partnership with Figshare and see more and more materials being posted there and hopefully one day we'll have our green open access manuscripts publish on the Figshare portal as well.

26:59

And I don't know if there are any questions.

27:01

I'm happy to take any questions, if there are, any.

27:05

Wonderful. Thank you so much, Angela. And thank you, Dan. Great.

27:10

There have been some questions that have come through, so there was one around indexing, and search engines, And actually, Angela may have answered that question. After the fact, in terms of indexing, in Google Scholar items, also indexed in Google, just generally, and Google Dataset search, it depends on the item types.

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I'm going to pop a link to a help article in the chat, if you want to learn a bit more about indexing, and how it works behind the scenes stuff.

27:43

And I'll also include that link in the recording e-mail that goes out if you want to have a leader. Very welcome to.

27:55

Questions?

28:00

There was a question around sort of what you see, the future of plain language summaries being. And I think this is a question for you, Angela. And sort of, is it something different?

28:12

That is something that different medical affairs teams will be tackling?

28:18

Yeah, I think, I think the future, play, let me start with is that they're only going to be in, because there's only going to increase, and we're going to see plain language summaries. It would be done in different formats, as well, in, currently, in terms of publications. More and more journalists are requiring that there is a plain language summary, actually, within the publication itself. So maybe a plain language summary abstract underneath the traditional article that is only a few hundred words long.

28:45

And then we're also seeing journals, such as the Future Science Group, journals publishing, standalone plain language summaries, which are beautiful infographics, several pages long. And we're also seeing greater demand from patients and patient organizations to have information in language that they can understand. But I would like to make the point that PLS aren't only for patients. They're really for any lay audience, for non-specialists, ACP, for payers, for the media, are caregivers, for a very, very broad audience. And I think, especially with what we see with Kobo and the pandemic this being a much, much greater interest in health care and everybody have a great understanding of the clinical trial is. And so there's really push for more and more information who need available for board audience. So what I anticipate is seeing more journals require plain language summaries.

29:38

More members of the public demand in plain language summaries and more research being done on the benefits of playing around with somebody. So currently, there is the beach research out there that shows that when you have a plain language summary, there are more views, more downloads, more citations of publications. I think that research is going to increase and we're going to see more information on what types of plain language summaries benefit with different audiences. So it isn't video is, there's an audio. Is it an infographic? Is it a graphical abstract? So I think we're going to see more and more information in the future.

30:13

Thank you very much. And, there's a question, as only, if you're able to answer, what were legals major concerns, and how did you address them, my company will be worried about our free materials directly aimed at patients.

30:26

Well, yes, so, though, are playing that, says, I said they're not aimed at patients, Patients are only one part of the audience for a plain language summary.

30:35

And, you know, so, that wasn't particularly illegal concerned because we can always made it very clear from the beginning that. They are not patient summaries. There are plain language summaries for a broad audience, and that does include health care providers. And then also, we have very strict requirements. When it comes to the development of our publication plain language summaries, they have to be consistent with the published manuscript, they go through, they have to be approved by the lead author of the publication, on, which they are based. We have a very detailed final checklist to ensure that they meet all the requirements.

31:11

So I, because we already have, I think, a very structured process in play for the development review and approval of plain language summaries that alleviated and we've been developing them for years before we even put the Figshare a portal in place and there's also already a level of comfort with plain language summaries, I don't think that wasn't a legal concern. I think what legal wanted to make sure, in our terms or Figshare portal that it wasn't a problem, is not a promotional site. We're not pushing content and that we did have all the relevant disclosures and disclaimers prominently placed on the site.

31:52

OK, thank you.

31:55

Angela, could you elaborate on why you chose or why you're using CC-by NC licenses?

32:03

Yeah. Well, that is, yeah, that was a, it's about came down to discuss it with the head of our copyright group.

32:11

So, the field, obviously, we want our plain language summaries to be made. We want them to be publicly available, so that's one of our requirements, actually, all plain language summaries that we publish. Publish a Figshare of the published in a manuscript, with is by the journal publisher, We have a requirement that they are available, open access, so you have to be free to access.

32:33

The copyright attorney felt like it's important that our the content we're posting on Figshare could not be used commercially by another party. So, that is why we have to, we selected that license. A patient or a patient organization group would not be considered a commercial party. So, if a patient unfortunately, organization didn't want to use PLS that we post that they would be able to do so.

33:04

So, that license limits use, we use by commercial organizations, but not by non commercial organizations.

33:13

Thank you very much.

33:15

Um.

33:19

Yeah. There's just to follow up on that. That's the key point, in many cases of NC Licenses with journals. You lose control over the commercial use.

33:28

And CTA sign with the publisher. Here, it makes sense because you retain it.

33:34

Thank you.

33:37

Um, I think there's just yeah, I've got time for just one more question. How aware of open data and open access are you seeing authors at Pfizer?

33:51

Well, I think that the publications management team has done an excellent job of promoting open access at Pfizer, has been a major push at the group, is the past several years, and we share the information that we send to our external authors of … is an author toolkit, which we speak about the importance of open access Open access is. So, there's been a lot of internal training, and awareness building, and also with our external authors. So, I think the awareness across the organization actually is extremely high, and with the external off is that we're working with this great are great ways. And then you have the groups like Open Pharma, which are you speaking about and publishing about open access? So I do think awareness is increasing internally and externally.

34:43

Great.

34:44

I think those are all the questions that have come through, and such things we'd say another. Thank you very much to Angela and Dan for presenting today. It's been really interesting, very informative, And I'll send the recording around and the next few days that if you have any questions, feel free to get in touch. Otherwise, we will leave it there. Thank you all for coming, And have a great rest of your day.

35:07

Thank you, Megan, Thanks, Dan.

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