How Do Libraries and Librarians Benefit from the Figshare Partnership?

In November 2015, ACS Publications announced a new partnership with Figshare to encourage the broad discovery and use of research data and supplemental information (SI).

The ACS Publications-Figshare partnership provides several tangible and immediate benefits to all users of ACS Publications, but what should libraries and librarians be aware of?

• Figshare now provides greater visibility, accessibility, and discoverability SI. Users will still be able to find and download SI through traditional means, like the ACS Publications website, but now our SI in Figshare can be found through Google, Google Scholar, and other indexing sources. We encourage librarians to include a link to Figshare in their LibGuides or other Chemistry Research Guides to help aid in the discoverability of SI.
• All SI published through ACS Publications and hosted in Figshare is issued a digital object identifier (DOI). These DOIs allow streamlined citation and discoverability of the SI. In addition for librarians working with researchers and in scholarly communications, these DOIs can partially fulfill funder requirements.
• Directly built into the Figshare platform is interactive and visualization tools to help users better understand the SI. The tools in Figshare can help aid in the instruction and understanding of aspects of chemistry at the microscopic level. For example, crystallographic files come to life and allow quick viewing and manipulation: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/suppl/10.1021/acs.inorgchem.5b00321.
• Finally, all SI is now freely available through the ACS Publications website and Figshare. We hope that freely available SI will encourage the reuse and advancement of chemistry for all of our global users.

To learn more about the ACS Publications-Figshare partnership, please read our ACS Axial article from February 2016: https://axial.acs.org/2016/02/08/figshare/.