The following post is from Mark Hahnel, founder of the Science 3.0 network and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Data in Science.

Scientific publishing as it stands is an inefficient way to do science on a global scale. A lot of time and money is being wasted by groups around the world duplicating research that has already been carried out. FigShare allows you to share all of your data, negative results and unpublished figures. In doing this, other researchers will not duplicate the work, but instead may publish with your previously wasted figures, or offer collaboration opportunities and feedback on preprint figures:

Data can currently be uploaded as a figure or as a dataset. The figures can be linked to datasets and vice-versa. Figures can include images, graphs, photographs and many other formats.

There is no need to register (You still can of course!). You can log in with any of the following social media accounts:

FigShare also gives you the ability to easily share your figures and datasets via a host of social media platforms through ‘share buttons’ on every page.

FigShare is a permanent database of your research. To further ensure this, FigShare is supported by ‘Systems Institute‘. Systems Institute is a not for profit which is providing ongoing support for the hosting of FigShare as it expands. This also allows FigShare to make backups of all of your data each and every day.

FigShare is being developed with the great work done by the Open Knowledge Foundation in mind. Ongoing converstaions with them about their CKAN project mean that we are all pulling in the same direction, and all data stored witin FigShare will be listed on a new CKAN science group.

The beta release of FigShare is a fully functional data sharing platform. We will continue to develop the features of the site to bring you even more tools to help get your data to a global audience. If you have any suggestions or feature requests please get in touch.

A special thanks to all those who helped with beta testing:

Pawel Szczesny, Heather Piwowar, Anthony Williams, Steve Koch, Jean-Claude Bradley, Cameron Neylon, Egon Willighagan, Rosie Redfield, Carl Boettiger, Alejandro Tamayo, and Martin Johnson.

If you have any questions or comments, please leave them below and we will endeavour to get back to you asap. Alternatively, get in touch via email at mark@figshare.com, @figshare on twitter, or through the FigShare facebook page.