CC-by at Holtzbrinck’s figshare


Leonard Dobusch and John Weitzmann at the CC-10-birthday party

randform hasn’t yet reported on a rather new online tool in scientific publishing which is called figshare. The german reader may have already read about it in an article by Aleks Scholz at the blog Riesenmaschine, the scientific minded reader may have used it already.


Figshare is an upload facility for (pre-)preprints and seems amongst others to basically fulfill all functions* which I had proposed in (around 2009?) at the blog n-category cafe, in emails to arxiv.org and also at Math 2.0 and which has been described again in more detail in this randform post about problems with the dissertation of Germany’s former minister of defense. The figshare faqs describes

figshare allows researchers to publish all of their data in a citable, searchable and sharable manner.

All figures, media, poster, papers and multiple file uploads (filesets) are published under a CC-BY license.

All datasets are published under CC0.

(The CC-BY licence is a socalled Creative Commons licence, which by the way just celebrates it’s tenth birthday with a lot of parties, even here in Berlin .)

and

The security and persistence of your files on figshare makes it easy to prevent plagiarism of your research data, as all uploads are time-stamped.

:)

Figshare, which was started in Sept 2011 by London based Mark Hahnel is supported by Digital Science, a Macmillan Publishers Company which is owned by Stuttgart based Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.

I haven’t yet used Figshare and I haven’t yet found a definite answer to the question why the Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group (which seems neither a non-profit organisation nor did it seem to appear as a distinguished CSR company -as far as I can tell ? ) would be interested in setting up such an archive.

*(a kind of authenticated “role based login” for the private section seems still to be missing (that is for example that professors could have the possibility to log in to the private section of their students))

3 Responses to “CC-by at Holtzbrinck’s figshare”

  1. Jared Khithim Says:

    You wrote: “Figshare is an upload facility for (pre-)preprints and seems amongst others to basically fulfill all functions* which I had proposed in (around 2009?) at the blog ”

    So this seems to be a quite clear violation of your copyrights! Are you going to sue Holtzbrinck?

  2. Mandy Says:

    CC-10-birthday party ?????

    is boring talks the new berlin party scoop?

  3. M. Boulangel Says:

    I agree with Jared Khithim. I mean you could make a fortune by setting up your own
    preprint server. The scientific work at such a server is a treasure trove, you could facilitate publishing and make the server a sought after resource. Moreover you would have a rather wealthy and technology savy useraugmented customership, which opens up completely new ITC branding customer relationship and interoperability business management role models (IBMRM). I wouldn’t let go such an opportunity.

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