Frontiers partners with Figshare to promote open data

Improved visualization, citation and discoverability of supplementary research data outputs in Frontiers journals  

Open data Figshare

London, UK, and Lausanne, Switzerland — Ahead of Open Data Day, Frontiers today announces its integration with Figshare’s online digital repository. This broadens the types of supplementary data that can be included with Frontiers articles, and enhances the visualization, discoverability, citation and sharing of research data outputs. The new service — which is provided at no extra charge to authors — also helps Frontiers authors to satisfy institutional and funder requirements for open and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data.

Supplementary data uploaded through the Frontiers platform will be automatically transferred to Figshare upon publication, and visualized directly in the article through an integrated widget that displays spreadsheets, images, graphs, videos and other data types. This allows readers to more easily view supplementary material.

All research outputs uploaded through the Frontiers platform are also viewable on a Frontiers data portal hosted by Figshare. All uploaded research outputs are citable and have a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), allowing authors to see views, downloads, citations and Altmetric information for their research outputs. The user-friendly website also facilitates the discovery, sharing and reuse of research outputs.

Kamila Markram, CEO and Co-Founder, Frontiers said, “Open research data is the foundation of accelerated knowledge creation. The Figshare tools will allow our authors to easily comply with their data deposition requirements and – more importantly – improve the presentation and discoverability of their datasets as well as make it easier to find the datasets of other researchers.”

Mark Hahnel, CEO and Founder, Figshare said: “We are pleased to announce that Figshare has partnered with Frontiers on helping to present and showcase their research data outputs. Through these efforts we hope to improve data discoverability and reuse.”

The partnership supports Frontiers’ Open Science philosophy of open access to research articles and FAIR data.


Frontiers is an award-winning Open Science platform and leading open-access scholarly publisher. Our mission is to make high-quality, peer-reviewed research articles rapidly and freely available to everybody in the world, thereby accelerating scientific and technological innovation, societal progress and economic growth. An open-access pioneer, Frontiers was the first to take scientific publishing entirely online and has developed numerous powerful Open Science tools that empower researchers and radically improve how science is evaluated, published and disseminated to researchers, innovators and the public. These include a virtual editorial office, a collaborative peer-review platform enhanced with artificial intelligence, a suite of article and author impact metrics, and fully integrated researcher profiles. Frontiers received the 2014 ALPSP Gold Award for Innovation in Publishing. For more information, visit www.frontiersin.org and follow @Frontiersin on Twitter.

Figshare is a web-based platform to help academic institutions manage, disseminate and measure the public attention of all their research outputs. The light-touch and user-friendly approach focuses on four key areas: research data management, reporting and statistics, research data dissemination and administrative control. Figshare works with institutions in North America and internationally to help them meet key funder recommendations and to provide world-leading tools to support an open culture of data sharing and collaboration. For more information, visit figshare.com and follow @figshare on Twitter. Figshare is a Digital Science portfolio company.

Digital Science is a technology company serving the needs of scientific and research communities, at the laboratory bench or in a research setting. It invests in and incubates scientific software companies that simplify the research cycle, making more time for discovery. Its portfolio companies and investments include a host of leading and admired brands including Altmetric, BioRAFT, Figshare, GRID, IFI CLAIMS, Labguru, Peerwith, Overleaf, ReadCube, Symplectic, TetraScience, Transcriptic, and ÜberResearch. It is operated by global media company, the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. For more information, visit www.digital-science.com and follow @digitalsci on Twitter.