Editorial commentary
Figshare is a concrete instance of the generalist repository type, not a category of its own — like Zenodo, Dryad, or OSF, it accepts research outputs across disciplines and data types under a single deposit workflow, rather than the subject-specific curation a domain repository applies. Figshare was founded in 2011 and has been commercially backed by Digital Science since a January 2012 relaunch.
Storage and file limits
The public figshare.com service is free for individual researchers: 20GB storage and a 20GB per-file limit on the free account. Figshare for Institutions, sold to universities as a branded deposit service with quota management, mediated curation, and integration with institutional CRIS and repository systems, supports up to 5TB per file, with private storage set by the institutional contract. Figshare+ is a separate paid, per-submission tier aimed at very large datasets tied to a specific publication.
Licensing and identifiers
Figshare mints DataCite DOIs on publication and defaults to CC-BY, with CC0 also available; institutional and Figshare+ instances support a broader Creative Commons suite (CC-BY-SA, CC-BY-NC, etc.). It supports embargoed and confidential deposits alongside fully open ones.
Certification — an important nuance
Figshare and its parent Digital Science hold information-security certifications (e.g. ISO 27001) relevant to platform security and stability. Figshare is not itself CoreTrustSeal-certified as a platform — its own support documentation states that it provides template text to help institutional customers pursue their own CoreTrustSeal certification for their branded instance. ‘Figshare supports CoreTrustSeal applications’ and ‘Figshare is CoreTrustSeal-certified’ are different claims; only the first is accurate for the platform itself, though a specific institutional Figshare deployment could hold its own certification independently.
References
- Digital Science, ‘Figshare’ (figshare.com); info.figshare.com user guides (file-size limits, licensing, security).
- See also: DataCite DOI, CoreTrustSeal, institutional repository.
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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