The Story Behind Figshare with Mark Hahnel

Insights Xchange: Conversations Shaping Academic Research

Join host Nikesh Gosalia as he chats with Mark Hahnel from Figshare about the creation of the Figshare platform. Mark talks about his background in genomics and how a gap year spent travelling eventually led him to do a PhD in stem cell biology. As a PhD student, he experienced struggles while trying to publish his research findings, and this inspired him to build his own publishing platform, which is now known as Figshare. For Figshare’s 10th anniversary, Mark reflects on Figshare’s collaboration with Digital Science and how the visionary thinking of their CEO led to Figshare being created before open science became common practice. Mark talks about the different versions of Figshare, from the free figshare.com which is open to everyone, to purpose-built versions of Figshare meant for specific organizations. This ties in with the open science concept of “as open as possible, as closed as necessary”, where not all datasets should be publicly available for safety. Mark shares his thoughts on what academics want out of publishing: something fast, good, open, and possibly free. He also addresses some drawbacks of Figshare, such as quality control, lack of data curation, and content monitoring issues.

Mark Hahnel is the Founder and CEO of Figshare, the all-in-one repository for papers, FAIR data, and nontraditional research outputs. He is passionate about open science and its potential to bring positive change to the research community. Mark has acted as an advisor for the Springer Nature master classes and is currently on the advisory board for the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). He can be reached on Twitter or LinkedIn.

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