FigureTwo launches with State of Open Data showcase

In this guest post, FigureTwo Founder and CEO Jeff Lang offers an important update since winning the Digital Science Catalyst Grant, and shares reimagined versions of key figures from the State of Open Data 2025 report.

In December, we were honoured to be named Digital Science Catalyst Grant winners, joining an esteemed alumni of startups working to improve technology across the scholarly landscape. Since receiving the grant, our team has been hard at work refining the platform and launching our MVP. We’re delighted to announce—during this very special Love Data Week—that FigureTwo is now open to everyone.

FigureTwo is reimagining scientific communication by helping authors create figures that are engaging, transparent, and easy to understand. Our AI-powered platform produces web-native visualizations that are data-connected, mobile-ready, accessible, and FAIR-compliant. These next-generation figures allow everyone—from peer reviewers to policymakers—to explore underlying data, validate results, and gain deeper insights.

With more than 35 million figures published every year, there’s a huge opportunity to reduce the time spent creating publication-ready visuals while ensuring authors, institutions, and publishers meet growing accessibility and open science requirements.

Our early user testing has highlighted a major gap: researchers rarely have tools designed specifically for creating figures in an academic and scholarly communication context. Instead, they rely on general-purpose software such as Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Google Suite, or Canva. FigureTwo fits seamlessly into existing workflows, making figure creation easier while also meeting standards, legislation, and publisher requirements out of the box.

In the spirit of data reuse and standing on the shoulders of giants, we’ve recreated the figures from the State of Open Data 2025 report and are now available in the FigureTwo gallery. We’ve long admired the work that Figshare, Digital Science, and Springer Nature have invested in this project over the past decade. By rebuilding these figures as data-connected visualizations, we’ve made it easier to analyse, contextualise, and explore the data.

This is just the beginning of the journey, and we encourage you to create an account and start building figures today.

What’s coming next

• Publishing with a DOI
• Long-term preservation
• AI agent support
• Templates
• Publisher-specific exports
• …and more

We’re growing fast and we want your input! Let us know which parts of the figure making process need improvement first.

For further reading, see Jeff’s guest post at The Scholarly Kitchen: Putting the “U” in FAIR.