Three things you didn’t know you could do on CORD

1. You can group your content and provide a link to a whole set of items. One way is to create a Collection, where you can add any public item (not necessarily your own, or even Cranfield’s) into a collated group of items. A Collection gets it own DOI and versioning, and is usually published. You might use this to gather favourites for your own use, or to share a recommended collection of datasets with students or colleagues. An example is this collection of financial data on Open Access charges.

Another way is to use a Project, which you can add people to (whether or not they use CORD/figshare – you can invite anyone by email), so colleagues or students can all contribute data to one place. A Project has no DOI or versioning, and doesn’t need to be public, but you might find it useful for larger funded projects, and can still publish it if you want to group a project’s outputs together.

2. You can share data before publication. You can generate a private link to share with others before you make an item publicly available – perhaps with collaborators to check that everyone is happy with those files going live, or perhaps with peer reviewers of your paper. The link can be used by anyone you share it with, not just CORD or figshare users, and it shares the record without the author names or the Cranfield University branding, so is usable even for double-blind peer review processes. Once you’ve finished sharing via the link – or if you change your mind about sharing! – you can disable it by selecting the ‘x’ next to the link.

3. You can see Altmetric data on each item. CORD is integrated with Altmetric so every public item you upload to it has an Altmetric Attention Score (once it has received attention). If you click on this score, you’ll be directed to your item’s page on Altmetric so you can see who has tweeted or blogged it, shared it on Facebook, which policy documents might have referenced it, and how many people have saved it to Mendeley. If your item hasn’t got and Altmetric ‘donut’ yet, take a look at this item on scholarly communication for an impressive example!

Do you have a favourite feature of CORD you want to highlight? Or do you have an idea for a new feature that would save you time? If so, let us know and we’ll see what we can do!

Image: corded redux, CC-BY-NC-SA