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Dryad

Who we are

Dryad is an open data publishing platform and a community committed to the open availability and routine re-use of all research data.

Our vision is for a future in which the open availability and routine reuse of all research data enables the acceleration of discovery across domains and the translation of research into benefits for society worldwide. We advance our vision through our mission: to enable the open publication and routine reuse of all research data.

Our multi-stakeholder community of academic and research institutions, research funders, scholarly societies and publishers is committed to leading in best practices for open data sharing and reuse. They invest in Dryad for the curation, open sharing and reuse of research data in all fields.

We value responsibility, inclusion, openness and trustworthiness:

  • We are mindful that our decisions can impact the health of the research community and the environment and we assume responsibility for considering the implications of our actions in advance.
  • We strive to overcome barriers to participation by individuals and organizations within the global research community.
  • We invest in open practices in research and in our organization to promote integrity, trust, collaboration and progress.
  • Our obligation as a trusted partner to research is to ensure that the interests of the research community remain our focus, that data are available to evidence new research, that data published with us persist, and that our organization and service are sustainable and available to support research so long as we are valued. Dryad is a signatory to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI).

In all of our convenings we are committed to abiding by our Code of conduct.

Get to know Dryad

Collaborations

Academic and research institutions, research funders, scholarly societies and publishers invest in Dryad for the curation, open sharing and reuse of research data in all fields. See our member list and how to join us.

Dryad advocates for community-adopted standards for metadata and persistent identifiers in concert with DataCite, ORCID, ROR, and Funder Registry.

We support the recommendations and implementation guidance of the Joint FORCE11 & COPE Research Data Publishing Ethics Working Group and the Joint Declaration on Data Citation Principles.

We are also pleased to partner with the following organizations and initiatives, for:

This list is a work-in-progress. If you’d like to suggest an addition, please contact us.

Dryad is grateful to the following consortia and institutions for their support of Dryad through SCOSS. Their contributions enable us to grow our outreach and promotion efforts to bring new members into our community; increase community engagement with current members and users; and stay at the forefront of best practice for data-sharing and building best practice for data reuse.

  • Council of Australian University Libraries (CAUL)

    • Auckland University
    • University of New South Wales
    • University of Melbourne
  • Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN)

    • Mount Royal University
    • Toronto Metropolitan University
    • University of Alberta
    • University of the Fraser Valley
    • University of Saskatchewan
    • University of Waterloo
  • SwissUniversities

    • ETH Zürich
    • Lib4RI
    • Université de Lausanne
  • Independent contributions

    • Iowa State University

Our most current grants and funding initiatives are listed in our Annual report.

Origins

Dryad was first conceived in a series of meetings in 2007, hosted alternately by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) in California (USA) and National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) in North Carolina (USA). Our first platform for curating and openly publishing a wide breadth of data types, such as those associated with research in ecology and evolutionary biology, was launched in 2008 with support from a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation.

The project was originally named DRIADE: The Digital Repository of Information and Data for Evolution – which was coincidentally also the name of a favorite local cafe. By the time the platform launched, the name had evolved to “Dryad,” which is easier to remember – frankly – and evokes positive associations with trees. It was important not to hard-code evolution research into what would become home for a wide-ranging scope of data but, with the shorter name, the founders did “coyly allude to phylogenies”.1

In the life of Dryad, outlined below, the introduction of the Joint Data Archiving Policy (JDAP) by a pioneering group of journals and scientific societies in 2011 is worth singling out. JDAP states, to start, that committing journals will require:

as a condition for publication, that data supporting the results in the paper should be archived in an appropriate public archive [...]. Data are important products of the scientific enterprise, and they should be preserved and usable for decades in the future.

The release of this statement was deeply formative in Dryad’s development and reflects a pioneering spirit that continues to drive us today.

Dryad’s timeline

2007
National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) (at the time, a collaboration of Duke University, with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State—all USA) creates Dryad with a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation
2008
Dryad goes live at datadryad.org
2011
The Joint Data Archiving Policy (JDAP) is released
2012
Dryad incorporates as a U.S. 501(c)(3) non-profit
2018
Dryad partners with the California Digital Library (CDL)
2019
Dryad launches on a new platform
2020
The Dryad-Zenodo integration goes live
2021
Dryad host to COVID Data Tracking Project from the Atlantic Monthly
2022
Dryad selecting by SCOSS for funding as essential open-source infrastructure
2023
CDL transitions from Dryad partner to Dryad member

From 2018 to 2023, Dryad was supported by in-kind investment in product management, platform development, and grants management through a partnership with the California Digital Library (CDL).

In 2024, the Dryad platform represents over 50,000 data publications – the work of over 200,000 researchers in connection with over 70,000 international institutions and over 1,000 academic journals.

For the latest figures, read our Annual report.