figshare, a Digital Science portfolio company, has announced a new partnership with open access publisher Public Library of Science (PLoS) to host the supplemental data for all seven PLoS journals, as well as provide a widget that will enable PLoS users to view data in the articles in the browser alongside the content.
figshare provides a free way for researchers to publish, share and get credit for their research data, hosting videos, datasets, graphs, figures and images. By partnering with figshare, PLoS can host data accompanying their publications, making the data easier to access for future use. Through figshare's new widgets, users will also be able to visualize the research objects within the browser.
"PLOS believes in making data as visible and useful as possible," said Kristen Ratan, Chief Publishing and Product Officer at PLoS. "Partnering with figshare is an important step in increasing the accessibility of the data associated with our research articles."
The new functionality on PLoS also allows the files to be discovered through a portal on figshare which will go live in the coming weeks. This combined with figshare's API functionality will allow easier linking of research outputs and the potential to build on previous research.
The partnership will also help PLoS fulfil the growing requests from funders for academics to make all of their research outputs available.
"We are delighted to be partnering with PLOS on this project, a publisher with a similar ethos," said Mark Hahnel, founder of figshare. "We hope this will better enable researchers to do more with the data behind the papers, improving the transparency of the research and aid reproducibility."
