Don’t let the availability of everything from hair transplants to prosthetic limbs fool you; science is stuck in the medieval age.

At least, its data storage system is: the paper-based, siloed arrangement whereby universities and research hubs go about archiving their research output hasn’t changed much in 800 years, according to Mark Hahnel, a scientist himself.

Until now.

Hahnel is dragging academics kicking and screaming into the information age with his cloud-based startup Figshare, which is taking advantage of new government funding mandates requiring institutions to make increasing amounts of their research publicly available by offering universities an easy way of doing it.

Hahnel was studying for his PhD in stem cell biology at Imperial College London when he grew frustrated at not being able to publish all his research.

That’s when he came up with the idea for the platform, which allows users to upload a variety of file formats which can then be viewed in a browser, making figures, datasets, videos, as well as papers widely available to other scientists.

He says: "The idea was that any researcher could come along, make their research outputs openly available, and benefit from others’ research on a subject.

"We tried to visualise everything in the browser because that’s the easiest way for people to access it. There really isn’t a way to do this other than Figshare."

The cloud-based platform, which relies on Amazon Web Services, looks set to transform collaboration in science, making research available for other scientists to utilise at unprecedented speed – becoming the internet for scientists.

But why, then, are some researchers reluctant to publish all their findings?

"It’s definitely a case of dragging a lot of academics along with this," admits Hahnel. "That paper publication system has been around since the 1200s so it’s a hard thing to shift.

"But the internet was designed for sharing academic content and the first website in the US was people trying to share academic content.

"The problem is people don’t publish negative data when someone funded it to the tune of £10,000."

So thus far the data available for scientists to learn from, and to guide their own research, has been severely lacking in context, providing a skewed view of the lay of the land because of scientists eager to justify further funding for future projects.
Now the funders have cottoned on, however, and they want all the results, not just hand-selected highlights.

"The funders are now saying ‘we spent billions of pounds on research and you can’t show us what it is’," affirms Hahnel.

"If you’ve messed up the experiment they don’t want to see that, but if you have results of an experiment soundly done they want to see them."

Not only that, but traditionally it then must be published in respected journals with limited pagination, released only so many times per year.

This creates something of a dichotomy, in that the cutting edge of scientific development is growing blunt waiting for the next issue of Nature to be released.

Perhaps this is why the British government has now made it a legal principle that all publicly-funded research must be openly available.

But a lot of the problems Hahnel believes are down to the simple fact that scientists are used to the status quo and don’t want to abruptly discard the paper system to shift to an electronic method they fear could be more complex.

"We want to make it stupidly simple," Hahnel adds. Figshare is free to use as a repository for up to 1GB of information, and thanks to the Creative Commons license, copyright is protected on the one hand, and on the other it ensures that all the data available is also citable in scientists’ own studies.

"All this stuff we can do now we couldn’t do 10 years ago," he says. "Technological advancements have made this possible."

The obvious downside to such a system is that, by sending research straight up into the cloud, there is the potential to sacrifice validation for speed.

Normally, published findings are peer-reviewed by other scientists so that their authenticity, logic and accuracy can be borne out by repeated experiments, establishing them as fact or at least as solidly-grounded theory.

Figshare tries to mimic this through algorithms reminiscent of a search engine’s, filtering content into categories like most viewed, most shared, or most downloaded.

And the company’s next step is to spur more collaboration between scientists, by utilising Amazon’s vast cloud resources to create spaces where they can work on projects with others around the country, sharing files publicly and privately.

Hahnel says: "That’s where the fun stuff really starts. That’s a big goal of ours."