Amsterdam universities sign up for Figshare offering

Figshare has announced that The University of Amsterdam (UvA) and the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA) have signed up for the Figshare for Institutions offering.

Figshare for Institutions is aimed at helping academic institutions manage, disseminate and measure the public impact of all their research outputs, while easing the route to compliance with open data mandates.

Following the meeting of the Competitiveness Council (a gathering of EU ministers of science, innovation, trade, and industry) in Brussels on 27th May, all scientific publicly funded articles in Europe must be freely accessible and the data must be reusable, unless there are 'well-founded reasons for not doing so' by 2020. In line with this move, UvA and HvA will go one step further and use Figshare for Institutions to provide an intuitive interface to enable the deposit and management of active research data, along with efficient mechanisms for open sharing, collaboration and discoverability.

The pioneering platform is already established at institutions across the U.K., Europe, Australasia, and the USA, supporting needs for better storage, preservation, accessibility and publication of the outputs produced by their researchers.

Mark Hahnel, CEO of Figshare, said: 'Figshare’s mission is to open up scientific data to the world, supporting the EU’s call to make all publicly funded scientific articles freely accessible by 2020. The University of Amsterdam is also committed to providing sound data management infrastructure, complying with these new mandates, so Figshare for Institutions was a natural solution for them.

'On top of this, they wanted a platform that would enable their researchers to conduct work more efficiently, offer greater opportunities for sharing and reuse of their research data, and a solution that allows for better management of research resources. We are pleased to offer them all of this functionality with Figshare for Institutions.'