Figshare
The twenty-four case studies in Made with CC were chosen from hundreds of nominations received from Kickstarter backers, Creative Commons staff, and the global Creative Commons community.
We did background research and conducted interviews for each case study, based on the same set of basic questions about the endeavor. The idea for each case study is to tell the story about the endeavor and the role sharing plays within it, largely the way in which it was told to us by those we interviewed.
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Figshare is a for-profit company offering an online repository where researchers can preserve and share the output of their research, including figures, data sets, images, and videos. Founded in 2011 in the UK.
figshare.com
Revenue model: platform providing paid services to creators
Interview date: January 28, 2016
Interviewee: Mark Hahnel, founder
Profile written by Paul Stacey
Figshare’s mission is to change the face of academic publishing through improved dissemination, discoverability, and reusability of scholarly research. Figshare is a repository where users can make all the output of their research available — from posters and presentations to data sets and code — in a way that’s easy to discover, cite, and share. Users can upload any file format, which can then be previewed in a Web browser. Research output is disseminated in a way that the current scholarly-publishing model does not allow.
Figshare founder Mark Hahnel often gets asked: How do you make money? How do we know you’ll be here in five years? Can you, as a for-profit venture, be trusted? Answers have evolved over time.
Mark traces the origins of Figshare back to when he was a graduate student getting his PhD in stem cell biology. His research involved working with videos of stem cells in motion. However, when he went to publish his research, there was no way for him to also publish the videos, figures, graphs, and data sets. This was frustrating. Mark believed publishing his complete research would lead to more citations and be better for his career.
Mark does not consider himself an advanced software programmer. Fortunately, things like cloud-based computing and wikis had become mainstream, and he believed it ought to be possible to put all his research online and share it with anyone. So he began working on a solution.
There were two key needs: licenses to make the data citable, and persistent identifiers — URL links that always point back to the original object ensuring the research is citable for the long term.
Mark chose Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to meet the need for a persistent identifier. In the DOI system, an object’s metadata is stored as a series of numbers in the DOI name. Referring to an object by its DOI is more stable than referring to it by its URL, because the location of an object (the web page or URL) can often change. Mark partnered with DataCite for the provision of DOIs for research data.
As for licenses, Mark chose Creative Commons. The open-access and open-science communities were already using and recommending Creative Commons. Based on what was happening in those communities and Mark’s dialogue with peers, he went with CC0 (in the public domain) for data sets and CC BY (Attribution) for figures, videos, and data sets.
So Mark began using DOIs and Creative Commons for his own research work. He had a science blog where he wrote about it and made all his data open. People started commenting on his blog that they wanted to do the same. So he opened it up for them to use, too.
People liked the interface and simple upload process. People started asking if they could also share theses, grant proposals, and code. Inclusion of code raised new licensing issues, as Creative Commons licenses are not used for software. To allow the sharing of software code, Mark chose the MIT license, but GNU and Apache licenses can also be used.
Mark sought investment to make this into a scalable product. After a few unsuccessful funding pitches, UK-based Digital Science expressed interest but insisted on a more viable business model. They made an initial investment, and together they came up with a freemium-like business model.
Under the freemium model, academics upload their research to Figshare for storage and sharing for free. Each research object is licensed with Creative Commons and receives a DOI link. The premium option charges researchers a fee for gigabytes of private storage space, and for private online space designed for a set number of research collaborators, which is ideal for larger teams and geographically dispersed research groups. Figshare sums up its value proposition to researchers as “You retain ownership. You license it. You get credit. We just make sure it persists.”
In January 2012, Figshare was launched. (The fig in Figshare stands for figures.) Using investment funds, Mark made significant improvements to Figshare. For example, researchers could quickly preview their research files within a browser without having to download them first or require third-party software. Journals who were still largely publishing articles as static noninteractive PDFs became interested in having Figshare provide that functionality for them.
Figshare diversified its business model to include services for journals. Figshare began hosting large amounts of data for the journals’ online articles. This additional data improved the quality of the articles. Outsourcing this service to Figshare freed publishers from having to develop this functionality as part of their own infrastructure. Figshare-hosted data also provides a link back to the article, generating additional click-through and readership — a benefit to both journal publishers and researchers. Figshare now provides
research-data infrastructure for a wide variety of publishers including Wiley, Springer Nature, PLOS, and Taylor and Francis, to name a few, and has convinced them to use Creative Commons licenses for the data.
Governments allocate significant public funds to research. In parallel with the launch of Figshare, governments around the world began requesting the research they fund be open and accessible. They mandated that researchers and academic institutions better manage and disseminate their research outputs. Institutions looking to comply with this new mandate became interested in Figshare. Figshare once again diversified its business model, adding services for institutions.
Figshare now offers a range of fee-based services to institutions, including their own minibranded Figshare space (called Figshare for Institutions) that securely hosts research data of institutions in the cloud. Services include not just hosting but data metrics, data dissemination, and user-group administration. Figshare’s workflow, and the services they offer for institutions, take into account the needs of librarians and administrators, as well as of the researchers.
As with researchers and publishers, Fig-share encouraged institutions to share their research with CC BY (Attribution) and their data with CC0 (into the public domain). Funders who require researchers and institutions to use open licensing believe in the social responsibilities and benefits of making research accessible to all. Publishing research in this open way has come to be called open access. But not all funders specify CC BY; some institutions want to offer their researchers a choice, including less permissive licenses like CC BY-NC (Attribution-NonCommercial), CC BY-SA (Attribution-ShareAlike), or CC BY-ND (Attribution-NoDerivs).
For Mark this created a conflict. On the one hand, the principles and benefits of open science are at the heart of Figshare, and Mark believes CC BY is the best license for this. On the other hand, institutions were saying they wouldn’t use Figshare unless it offered a choice in licenses. He initially refused to offer anything beyond CC0 and CC BY, but after seeing an open-source CERN project offer all Creative Commons licenses without any negative repercussions, he decided to follow suit.
Mark is thinking of doing a Figshare study that tracks research dissemination according to Creative Commons license, and gathering metrics on views, citations, and downloads. You could see which license generates the biggest impact. If the data showed that CC BY is more impactful, Mark believes more and more researchers and institutions will make it their license of choice.
Figshare has an Application Programming Interface (API) that makes it possible for data to be pulled from Figshare and used in other applications. As an example, Mark shared a Figshare data set showing the journal subscriptions that higher-education institutions in the United Kingdom paid to ten major publishers.1 Figshare’s API enables that data to be pulled into an app developed by a completely different researcher that converts the data into a visually interesting graph, which any viewer can alter by changing any of the variables.2
The free version of Figshare has built a community of academics, who through word of mouth and presentations have promoted and spread awareness of Figshare. To amplify and reward the community, Figshare established an Advisor program, providing those who promoted Figshare with hoodies and T-shirts, early access to new features, and travel expenses when they gave presentations outside of their area. These Advisors also helped Mark on what license to use for software code and whether to offer universities an option of using Creative Commons licenses.
Mark says his success is partly about being in the right place at the right time. He also believes that the diversification of Figshare’s model over time has been key to success. Figshare now offers a comprehensive set of services to researchers, publishers, and institutions.3 If he had relied solely on revenue from premium subscriptions, he believes Figshare would have struggled. In Figshare’s early days, their primary users were early-career and late-career academics. It has only been because funders mandated open licensing that Figshare is now being used by the mainstream.
Today Figshare has 26 million–plus page views, 7.5 million–plus downloads, 800,000–plus user uploads, 2 million–plus articles, 500,000-plus collections, and 5,000–plus projects. Sixty percent of their traffic comes from Google. A sister company called Altmetric tracks the use of Figshare by others, including Wikipedia and news sources.
Figshare uses the revenue it generates from the premium subscribers, journal publishers, and institutions to fund and expand what it can offer to researchers for free. Figshare has publicly stuck to its principles — keeping the free service free and requiring the use of CC BY and CC0 from the start — and from Mark’s perspective, this is why people trust Figshare. Mark sees new competitors coming forward who are just in it for money. If Figshare was only in it for the money, they wouldn’t care about offering a free version. Figshare’s principles and advocacy for openness are a key differentiator. Going forward, Mark sees Figshare not only as supporting open access to research but also enabling people to collaborate and make new discoveries.
Web links
- figshare.com/articles/Journal_subscription_costs_FOIs_to_UK_universities/1186832
- retr0.shinyapps.io/journal_costs/?year=2014&inst=19,22,38,42,59,64,80,95,136
- figshare.com/features
