melisacbl
commented
7 years ago Hi @maurolepore and @odealab
figshare seems to be a great place to publish the book. Materials you can upload include papers, figures, data, code, models, videos, posters (from conferences etc.), teaching materials, and powerpoint presentations. You can obtain a DOI for each work you upload (it doesn't need to be an actual paper. So you can get a DOI for a code you wrote/poster you presented at a conference/teaching material you use for a lecture), and they also allow for different versions. You can also reserve a DOI for a work that you are not ready to publish yet, and decide on what you want to make public and private (I still don't know too much about this).
Uploads are also searchable on google scholar/google in general (even simply typing figshare in google scholar will give you a whole list of materials both available on google scholar and figshare). If you click and view any one of the uploads, it readily provides you the citation for it (and allows you to export the citation with any citation programs you're using e.g. RefWorks, BibTex etc.). Anything you upload will also be licensed to whichever licensing format you choose (I'm not too familiar with licensing in general so I can't say much about it). (A good place to learn about suitable licences is this: http://choosealicense.com.)
And guess what, they are partnered with Github! so you can import your github projects and codes in and upload them (usually as codes). It is free to create an account and you're automatically given 20 gb of space and allowed to upload files up to 5gb in size. Apparently, you can create accounts for institutions (e.g. STRI) or publishers (Odealab?) but you will have to contact them to create that kind of account (though there seems to be a fee involved).
You can also create projects involving multiple collaborators in it. This means that, for example, we can create the coral book project and invite whoever we want as collaborators (as long as they have a figshare account) and anyone of us can upload a chapter, paper, etc to the project. Though it won't ultimately compile it into a book, at least there is a platform for consolidating them together. Another feature they have is collections, which is basically allowing people to "collect/bookmark" works of others that they like.
That is all I have so far. I've created an account (melisacbl) to experiment with it and everything seems pretty straightforward (even the ability to link your figshare account with Github). Personally, I think figshare is great and even the developers themselves are trying to make it as easy and accessible as possible for users. I think I'm sold. What do you think?
odealab
maurolepore
@melisacbl: Please write your findings here.