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What is Dryad?

Dryad is both an international repository of data underlying peer-reviewed scientific and medical literature, and a membership organization, governed by journals, publishers, scientific societies, and other stakeholders.

Dryad is distinguished by the close association of data deposition with the process and business of scholarly publishing, and by using article publication as a model for how researchers can benefit from data sharing infrastructure. Dryad has the potential to transform the way research data are communicated and preserved. The credibility and effectiveness of the research enterprise is due in large part to the social contract behind scholarly publishing. Researchers disclose their work to their peers in return for professional credit. In so doing, they also expose their findings to be confirmed or refuted, and enable other researchers to build upon their results. Dryad seeks to extend this social contract to research data by providing a model for how a disciplinary repository can motivate researchers to disclose the data that is of the greatest value for scientific reuse, that associated with publications, and realize the manifold benefits of free access to scientific data in perpetuity.

What is in the repository?

Dryad serves as a repository for tables, spreadsheets, flatfiles, and all other kinds of published data that do not have another discipline-specific repository. The Dryad repository allows investigators to validate published findings, explore new analysis methodologies, repurpose the data for research questions unanticipated by the original authors, and perform synthetic studies such as formal meta-analyses. All data files in Dryad are available for download and reuse, except those that are under a temporary embargo period, as permitted by editors of the relevant journals. A special section of the repository named DryadLab hosts datasets of particular educational value for use in undergraduate and graduate training.

How does data get submitted?

Dryad welcomes data submissions related to any published, or accepted, scholarly publication. Any society, journal or publisher that wishes to encourage data archiving may refer authors to Dryad.

Journals and publishers may greatly facilitate their authors' data archiving by implementing "submission integration," by which the journal manuscript submission system interfaces with Dryad. In a nutshell: the journal sends automated notifications to Dryad of new manuscripts, which enables Dryad to create a provisional record for the article's data, thereby streamlining the author's data upload process. The published article includes a link to the data in Dryad, and Dryad links to the published article. See complete documentation of this process here.

How is Dryad governed and supported?

The Dryad organization provides a forum for all stakeholders to set priorities for the repository, participate in planning, and share knowledge and coordinate action around data policies. Members include journals, publishers, scientific societies, funding agencies, and other data centers. Dryad is incorporated as a non-profit organization registered in the US; for more information see Governance.

Dryad is able to provide free access to data due to financial support from members and data submitters. Dryad’s Data Publishing Charges are designed to sustain its core functions by recovering the basic costs of curating and preserving data. New innovations are enabled by research and development grants and by support from donors. For more detail about these charges, see the Pricing plan information on the Dryad website.

As part of its commitment to sustainability, Dryad participates in the DataONE network (the Data Observation Network for Earth, http://dataone.org), and is actively developing partnerships with other international data networks and scholarly publishing organizations.

Take a look at our business and sustainability plan, our grant funding, and the people who have helped develop the repository.