Peer Review

Figshare: Making Open Research Discoverable

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Reviewed:: Dec 10, 2018 by Psychology

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Ratings

Overall Rating:

Content Quality:

Effectiveness:

Ease of Use:

Overview:

Figshare is an online repository for open access data. The repository allows anyone to search uploaded materials in many fields; there are more than 25 subfields in psychology including posters, articles, materials, media, and data. Individuals can join to upload materials to share or use space to work with others. Individual accounts are free.

Figshare also offers a paid service to institutions who would like to use the site as a cloud-based resource. Figshare is hosted on Amazon Web Services.

From the website: Figshare is a repository where users can make all of their research outputs available in a citable, shareable and discoverable manner. Figshare allows users to upload any file format to be previewed in the browser so that any research output from posters and presentations to datasets and code, can be disseminated in a way that the current scholarly publishing model does not allow.

Type of Material:

Learning Object Repository/Cloud-Based Storage/Open Data Publishing

Recommended Uses:

Materials could be used as a class assignment to review data, examine presentations, or further develop a research project. (This is a vast repository and would best be accessed by the educator to find suitable material to use in class.)
More advanced students also could be encouraged to upload their projects to the repository, providing a wider audience for such research.
The site allows researchers to collaborate and share materials.

Technical Requirements:

Two peer reviewers successfully surfed the site on multiple browsers. The site supports assistive technology for searches, and users are able to upload a variety of file formats such as PowerPoint, PDF, Word documents and data in various forms such as SPSS or Excel data.

Identify Major Learning Goals:

There are not learning goals as such; however, Figshare does offer a space for researchers to share data and record phenomena such as null results which educators can use to give students practice with real world data.

Target Student Population:

College Upper Division, Graduate School, Professional: Advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty would find the material useful in classwork as well as in their own scholarship.

Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:

Use of the data would require prior knowledge of databases and statistical packages. The site itself is very large, and inexperienced students may find it difficult to navigate quickly to find what they are seeking.
Use of the research may require additional reading if ones does not have a background in those fields.

Content Quality

Rating:

Strengths:

The site includes a variety of information across many disciplines and fields within those disciplines. Joining is free and includes 20 GB of free private space, unlimited public space, a doi for one's work, collaborative spaces, and private link sharing from anywhere. Anyone can search the site with or without registering.
The wide variety of data papers and presentations can be useful to a range of students. This information can be used to research a topic, locate appropriate papers, find datasets for practice, and so on.

Concerns:

In any open site, the content is only as good as what is uploaded. Those who post need to be sure they have the licensure to post those materials.
The quality of uploaded data demonstrably varies (e.g., a dataset with no identifying information to explain its purpose).
In some cases related elements are not stored together, thus making it difficult to locate needed content. For example, a dataset, figures and set of references from the same project may be separated by information from other unrelated projects. This could be addressed by asking people to upload all related information in a single file.

Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool

Rating:

Strengths:

The site will allow educators and students to identify research which has null or contradictory findings as well as offering a further resource for research.
Traditional journal articles do not include the sharing of additional information such as data, poster presentations, or the opportunity for collaborative work. This free site allows researchers to post their own work while collaborating with others.

Concerns:

There are no clear learning objectives for the site (as this is not its purpose). To use the information as a teaching tool will require time and input from an educator to locate and transform the information.

Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty

Rating:

Strengths:

The site is easy to use. The menus are clear, and the site is easy to search.
The site accepts and hosts a wide variety of file format and works well on a variety of browsers and with accessibility technology. The software is robust and reasonably straightforward to navigate.

Concerns:

The large number of resources mean that finding suitable resources may be a little difficult. One way of addressing this would be to group files by the same researcher so that images and data can be found together.
Some items are not associated with an explanation (i.e., it is unclear what they are), thus making them challenging to use.
Extra categories would be useful as would adding flags to the data to make them more easily locatable for educational purposes (e.g., published work, null results, large dataset).
The site covers a wide variety of topic areas although some of the names are not as clear as they could be (e.g., technology is mostly biotechnology, with some agricultural links).

Other Issues and Comments:

Overall: A fantastic idea and much needed.

Creative Commons: