Since December 2015, if our authors have had supplementary files to accompany their papers or if they have the data files behind the research that went into their papers, the Geological Society of London (GSL) has been able to deposit these files into GSL’s portal on Figshare (https://geolsoc.figshare.com/) on the authors’ behalf. Our archive of supplementary material from articles published between 2003 and 2015 has also been deposited into the Figshare portal.

The data files are given a DOI and we create a link to these data in the author’s paper via a short statement describing the supplementary material, which sits below the abstract. Any subsequent mention of the data within the paper (e.g. ‘see Supplementary figure S1’) will also have a hyperlink to take the reader out to the data in Figshare.

You can supply files in many formats, including video and multimedia files, tabular data and geosite data. Once we have uploaded and published your files, you can share the material more easily, cite it using the DOI and track its usage through Figshare’s metrics. The files are stored under a Creative Commons License to facilitate reuse and when you look at the material on Figshare you will see a link on the right-hand side, taking the reader back to the parent article on the Lyell Collection. This means that not only are your data more discoverable, reusable and shareable, but more people may end up reading your original article.

GSL is a society devoted to advancing the geosciences. We are a signatory to COPDESS’ statement of commitment and encourage all our authors to make their data available and archived in an appropriate publicly accessible repository. Many of our authors are funded by major funding bodies, which will direct the authors to deposit their data on NERC or the BGS data archive. Other authors, funded by different bodies, will still need a home for their data and our portal on Figshare provides such a home. You can check out our data policy for further information on other suitable repositories.

Take a look at our portal and discover the breadth of freely accessible research that’s there.

To date, we have nearly 620 000 views of the material and over 131 000 downloads.

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The Production Team