Database Helps Researchers Share and Find Those Data that Don’t Make it Into Peer-Reviewed Publications – A New Data Source for UCSF Profiles?

Unpublished or negative data rarely leave the lab books, even though they may help the scientific community at large avoid the repetition of unnecessary experiments. I recently came across the Academic Productivity blog and Mark Hahnel’s post about FigShare, an interesting initiative, released in March 2011, that tries to make it easy for researchers to share those types of research results. Since the data are categorized and tagged, I’m wondering whether – at some point – the database could turn into a data source for Profiles.

Mark Hahnel explains FigShare:

This is a new way of bringing scientific research online and to a new audience. By categorising and tagging the research, it becomes very searchable …there is also the ability to easily share figures, datasets and videos via a host of social media platforms through ‘share buttons’ on every page.

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Also noteworthy, FigShare is collaborating with Digital Science which provides a suite of tools to make science more productive.