Bill Ayres, Strategic Lead for Research Data Management, explains the difference between Figshare and the newly announced Figshare+.

Recently Figshare announced their new Figshare+ service for big data, which offers publishing for datasets up to 5TB in size, or even larger. This service includes a one-time Data Publishing Charge to cover deposit, review, publication and long term preservation for large datasets and related resources. You can find a useful overview and indicative pricing on the Figshare website.

To avoid confusion, the University’s research data repository, Figshare, is built on the established Figshare for Institutions platform. This Figshare repository is free to use for UoM researchers, accessible via your usual login credentials, and in most cases can provide sufficient storage to store and publish your datasets which support projects and published outputs.

Figshare+ is a separate platform, and as above is chargeable. We do recognise that it may be of interest to researchers who wish to publish large datasets and we are working with Figshare to look at how these products can be used together easily for institutional customers.

In the meantime, if you think that Figshare+ may be useful for publishing large datasets from your project, or would like advice on costing it into your grant application or DMP, please speak to the RDM Team in the Library in the first instance. We can be contacted via our dedicated email address:

• researchdata@manchester.ac.uk