Swap shop could speed innovation

摘要

Scientists at Imperial College London and the Saarland University in Germany have become the first to use a new free-to-access "swap-shop", where scientists deposit and exchange data. The project, called Figshare, could reduce the cost of research and deliver a raft of new discoveries. The architects of the service say it could bring about new advances faster in all fields of science, medicine and engineering by bringing together results from different sources. It allows data from multiple experiments to be analysed by powerful computers to uncover previously unseen trends.