Policies

This page offers links to Dryad policy documents.

Policies in effect

 * The Dryad Terms of Service are posted on the website, and this document incorporates the Dryad Content Policy and the Dryad Privacy Policy.

Draft policies
The following policy is in development:
 * Preservation Policy

Working policy statements from the OpenDOAR policy tool
Below are policy statements generated by the OpenDOAR policy tool which creates formulaic summary policy statements for use by repositories. While generally accurate, this tool is not consistently well suited to the Dryad repository and therefore the wording of some of these statements is problematic. For example, Submission policy #1 implies that Dryad will only accept material from members of a "subject community", where in fact no such restriction exists, but no broader option is available in the OpenDOAR policy tool.

Metadata Policy for information describing items in the repository
 * 1) Anyone may access the metadata free of charge.
 * 2) The metadata may be re-used in any medium without prior permission for not-for-profit purposes provided the OAI Identifier or a link to the original metadata record are given.

Data Policy for full-text and other full data items
 * 1) Anyone may access full items free of charge.
 * 2) Copies of full items generally can be:
 * 3) *reproduced, displayed or performed, and given to third parties in any format or medium
 * 4) *for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge provided:
 * 5) *the authors, title and full bibliographic details are given
 * 6) *a hyperlink and/or URL are given for the original metadata page
 * 7) *the content is not changed in any way
 * 8) Mention of Dryad is appreciated but not mandatory.

Content Policy for types of document & data set held
 * 1) This is a multi-institution subject-based repository.
 * 2) Subject Specialities:
 * 3) *Biology and Biochemistry
 * 4) *Ecology and Environment
 * 5) *Health and Medicine
 * 6) Dryad is restricted to:
 * 7) *Datasets
 * 8) *Software
 * 9) *Other special item types
 * 10) *Special materials: other supplemental materials associated with published articles
 * 11) Deposited items may include accepted versions (author's final peer-reviewed drafts)
 * 12) Items are individually tagged with their version type and date.
 * 13) Principal Languages: English

Submission Policy concerning depositors, quality & copyright
 * 1) Items may only be deposited by accredited members of the subject community, or their delegated agents. (CORRECTION: Data may be submitted by any author associated with a scientific publication.)
 * 2) Authors may only submit their own work for archiving.
 * 3) Eligible depositors must deposit bibliographic metadata for all their publications.
 * 4) The administrator only vets items for relevance to the scope of Dryad, valid layout & format, and the exclusion of spam
 * 5) The validity and authenticity of the content of submissions is the sole responsibility of the depositor.
 * 6) Items can be deposited at any time, but will not be made publicly visible until any publishers' or funders' embargo period has expired.

Preservation Policy
 * 1) Items will be retained indefinitely.
 * 2) Dryad will try to ensure continued readability and accessibility.
 * 3) Dryad is working with external partners to:
 * 4) * convert or migrate file formats
 * 5) *record preservation metadata
 * 6) *backup items in external archives
 * 7) Dryad regularly backs up its files according to current best practice.
 * 8) Items may not normally be removed from Dryad.
 * 9) Acceptable reasons for withdrawal include:
 * 10) *Journal publishers' rules
 * 11) *Proven copyright violation or plagiarism
 * 12) Withdrawn items are not deleted per se, but are removed from public view.
 * 13) Withdrawn items' identifiers/URLs are retained indefinitely.
 * 14) URLs will continue to point to 'tombstone' citations, to avoid broken links and to retain item histories.
 * 15) The metadata of withdrawn items will not be searchable.
 * 16) If necessary, an updated version may be deposited.
 * 17) *The item's persistent URL will always link to the latest version.
 * 18) *There will be links between earlier and later versions, with the most recent version clearly identified.
 * 19) Items are allocated a checksum to facilitate the detection of alterations.
 * 20) In the event of Dryad being closed down, the database will be transferred to another appropriate archive.