Started: January 2011
Based: London
Website: www.figshare.com
Twitter: @figshare
Category: Education

Figshare enables academics to upload data so that figures, datasets, press releases, papers and presentations can be shared with other people.

The service was founded in 2011 by Dr Mark Hahnel who, after finishing his PhD in stem cell biology at Imperial College in London, recognised that the bulk of his research was not available to the wider research community.

Figshare is free to access and free to upload content onto the online repository. By encouraging the publishing of data, Figshare hopes knowledge can be shared more quickly and effectively.

Since it started the site has received investment from Digital Science, a division of Macmillan Publishers, and now hosts over one million research outputs.

The aim is to become the world's number one non-paper research data repository - opening up data that would be otherwise closed for discovery and dissemination.