“The main thing about Figshare is its community-based so all of our good ideas, all of these new innovations have come from the community, institutions and publishers.”
Ahead of ESOF 2014, we talk to three leading figures in science, technology and academia who through frustrations of not having the effective tools necessary to do their work, decided to build their own.
In this three-part series in the run-up to Europe’s largest, general science meeting held every two years, this year in Copenhagen (June 21-26), we look at the increasing number of start-up companies that are “spinning out” of academic institutions worldwide.
Here, the founder of Figshare, Mark Hahnel talks about making the leap from academia to business and why he thinks open science is revolutionising the research community.
Mark’s background:
Mark completed his PhD in stem cell biology at Imperial College London three years ago, having previously studied genetics in both Newcastle and Leeds. He is passionate about open science and the potential it has to revolutionise the research community. Figshare is looking to become the place where all academics make their research openly available, as well as producing a secure cloud based storage space for their outputs. By encouraging users to manage their research in a more organised manner, so that it can be easily made open to comply with funder mandates. Openly available research outputs will mean that academia can truly reproduce and build on top of the research of others.
What were the biggest frustrations you faced in academia?
As a stem cell biologist, I created lots of videos and datasets that never really fit into the publication process. So as of right now, three years on from finishing my PHD, I have three papers from that time that have five static images in each and none are suited to the new ways we can disseminate research, videos, the datasets and the molecules, so I wanted to make academia more web native and to disseminate the content in the way it was formed.
