Introduction

There are three ways accounts can be created in Figshare and accounts must be managed using whatever method they were created through. Accounts can be created through an HR Feed or through first login via single sign-on (SSO), and account can be created manually. An account that is created through first login (i.e. the person logs into the repository through SSO for the first time and Figshare creates an account) must be managed through the SSO system. An account created manually, must be managed manually.

How accounts are created in your repository was determined during implementation. However, at any point you can create one or more manual accounts. Please see the 'Manual Account creation using the API' article in this support site for more.

View User Account Information

Information on users in your Figshare instance can be found on the Administration page under the Users tab at the top of the screen. From this page, you can see the names of all users within the system, the group structure they sit under, the number of projects they created, and the amount of storage allocated to their account. Users marked as inactive are displayed in lighter grey and italics. These are users your institution has deactivated via the HR feed or whatever your system is for creating user accounts.

Here are descriptions for each column:

Structure Group: This indicates what Group the user account is associated with.

Projects: This indicates how many individual projects the account owns. It does not count Group projects the account owns (which are shown in the Groups tab) or any projects the account is a collaborator or viewer of.    

Storage: the first piece of information is the quota they have already used by uploading files in My data or in individual projects, while the last value is the quota they have been allocated with. That value is the same value the user will see in their My data.

Gear/Cog Icon: This opens a clickable link for the administrator to impersonate and account.

Download user report: This link at the lower left of the table becomes active once you check the box next to one or more account names. It will download a user report with all account information including storage, account/user ids, number of projects and collections, and Altmetric score.

Impersonating User Accounts

Administrators can impersonate any user that falls under their group structure. Administrators at the institution level can impersonate any user, whereas administrators of groups can only impersonate any user within their group or subgroups. Impersonations can be useful for making amends to metadata, uploading on behalf of an author so the item remains within the author’s account, and troubleshooting support.

To impersonate a user (either active or inactive), go to the Users tab on the group structure page. Find the user you want to impersonate, go to the cog on the right hand side, and select Access this account.

Please note: when an administrator impersonates a user, administrators are able to see confidential files. Therefore, if a file is highly confidential, we recommend uploading a metadata record only.

While accessing the account, all the actions performed by the administrator are added to the audit log. The actions are set as performed by the administrator.

To report on users, please see our article on usage reporting and statistics.