Using Figshare

Well before I became interested in institutional repositories for posters and slides, I had already started depositing them in  Slideshare, a cloud storage service that allows you to view slides on websites, blogs, social networks, and more. This feature of Slideshare always pleased me a lot. It had everything I found interesting to spread ideas: automatic integration with LinkedIn and other social networks, snippets for easy incorporation into blogs, personal, institutional and other pages, as well as a personal page that centralized all my uploads. In addition to all these goodies, it featured online editing and traffic analysis. But Slideshare is not a publishing venue. Its content has no integration for scientific citation.

When I first met F1000Research, I found their proposal interesting and that it filled a gap in this non-traditional form of publication. I soon noticed several differences from Slideshare: apart from the public storage of a presentation, all the rest of the features found in Slideshare are missing from the F1000Research. The biggest difference is that on this last platform, the poster receives a quotable DOI. Well, looking for alternatives, I found a platform that brings together the best of F1000Research with the best (almost) of Slideshare: Figshare.

By posting slideshows on that platform, I was impressed by its simple and straightforward interface, allowing for submission in a few minutes. You can choose bookmarks (unlike F1000Research, which gave me a problem), choose the sharing level and the publishing license, as in Slideshare (in F1000Research the publications are always public and licensed CC-BY). In addition, it has room for metadata, full version control (can be edited), desktop uploader application, allows you to choose whether to use a DOI or not, among other features. It seems to me that the only thing that Slideshare has that Figshare does not have are the tools of traffic analysis.

There is no limit to the language and type of material to be submitted, EXCEPT that it must necessarily be academic material. Preprints, published articles (since you own copyright rights), theses, dissertations, monographs, classes, notes, research data, anything related to the world of academia. No commercial or corporate use, advertising or material deemed inappropriate is allowed. Content is published immediately. Subsequently, anything that violates the terms of use is deleted without notice.

Figshare has a personal page with its publications and snippets for incorporation into websites and blogs and has facilities for social networks. See below for one of the slides I posted in Figshare:


The DOI number assigned by Figshare is from DataCite, not from CrossRef, if that really makes any difference. Concluding, in my opinion, the ideal academic platform to deposit alternative material, including posters, slides, assorted texts, etc. is Figshare. Despite the positive features of F1000Research, its platform has a lot to grow to face Figshare.

Update: unfortunately, I later encountered a negative feature of Figshare. See here in my post.