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Figshare

Digital Science
closed / Overall score: n/a

Figshare is a research repository where researchers deposit datasets alongside figures, papers, software and other outputs, each published with a DataCite DOI. Items keep numbered versions, and a REST API covers creating, uploading, publishing and fetching them. The public figshare.com repository is free for individual researchers, and Digital Science sells the same software to institutions and publishers as hosted repositories.

Scored for its role as a dataset repository. Figshare accepts many kinds of research output, and datasets are one item type among them.

Openness

1 high confidence
1.0
license
proprietary(hosted service
source
closed(hosted repository software sold by Digital Science)

Figshare is hosted repository software that Digital Science runs for researchers and sells to institutions and publishers, and its code is not published. The public API reaches the hosted service but does not let anyone run a Figshare repository of their own.

  • https://info.figshare.com/about/ recorded 2026-10-08

    "Figshare is a provider of repository software"; "Figshare is part of a portfolio of solutions from Digital Science"; "DataCite DOI minting, machine readable metadata, licenses, and OAI-PMH interoperability".

Adoption

not assessed

Figshare shows views, downloads and citations on individual items but publishes no total for its datasets or its users. No figure for the repository as a whole could be read.

  • https://info.figshare.com/ recorded 2026-10-08

    Home page: "Track ... downloads, views, citations and Altmetric attention data" per output; no repository-wide usage figure.

Capability

4 medium confidence
4.0

Researchers can create, upload and publish datasets through Figshare's API as well as its website, and each item gets a DataCite DOI with numbered versions. Like Zenodo, it serves files as they were deposited, without parsing tables into a structure its API returns.

  • https://api.figshare.com/v2/articles/33461998/versions recorded 2026-10-08

    Versions of a dataset item: [{"version": 1, "url": "https://api.figshare.com/v2/articles/33461998/versions/1"}].

  • https://docs.figshare.com/ recorded 2026-10-08

    OAI-PMH: "Currently, the supported formats are: Dublin Core ( oai_dc ), Datacite ( oai_datacite ), RDF ( rdf ), CERIF XML ( cerif )"; upload files through the Uploads API.

  • https://docs.figshare.com/swagger.json recorded 2026-10-08

    API v2 specification: "POST /account/articles - Create new Article", "POST /account/articles/{article_id}/publish - Private Article Publish", "GET /articles/{article_id}/versions - List article versions".

  • https://info.figshare.com/ recorded 2026-10-08

    "We have provided a free repository for individual researchers for over a decade".

Verified 2026-10-08