New Dryad is Here

The Dryad team has worked over the past year to understand what features are required to best support the research community’s ever-evolving needs. We are proud to announce the launch of our new Dryad platform and we are excited to share with the research community the enhancements that we have made!

Dryad’s newest features are centered around making data publishing as easy as possible for researchers:

• In addition to supporting datasets as part of a journal submission, Dryad now also supports datasets being submitted independently
• Data can be uploaded from cloud storage or lab servers
• Datasets can be as large as 300GB
• Datasets can easily be updated or versioned at any time in our process
• Standardized data usage and citation statistics are updated and displayed for each published dataset
• Data can be submitted and downloaded through our new REST APIs

Since our beginning, Dryad has curated, published, and archived nearly 30,000 datasets underlying scholarly articles. While Dryad began and flourished in the ecology and evolutionary biology communities, it now encompasses the life and biomedical sciences and is gaining larger traction in the broader science and publishing landscapes. As Dryad expands its disciplinary scope, we are taking into consideration the evolution of data management and publication practices throughout the sciences.

New features to support current research practices

Because of these changing needs, we believe it is essential to allow for datasets to be submitted and published at any point in the research process. We see the need for datasets to be submitted or published at the point of preprints, micropublications, project completion, null result findings, or in preparation for submitting a manuscript (to name a few).

We also understand that data and research are dynamic, so it is important to support versioning and enhanced descriptor fields for these datasets through the research process. As part of the new Dryad, we have increased fields for usage notes, methods, standard vocabularies (i.e., funder), as well as increased file size limits all to enable consistent updating and improvements.

We believe these changes can allow researchers to make their datasets as usable and understandable (FAIR) as possible, treating each dataset as a citable and valued research output.

“We aim to build in best practices for research data so researchers don’t have to think about compliance and making their data discoverable.”
-Daniella Lowenberg, Dryad Product Manager

The road ahead

Dryad has long been embedded in the scientific communities through support by and for the outputs of funding bodies (i.e., National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, European Commission, private funding agencies, etc) and journal publishers and societies (i.e. The Royal Society, British Ecological Society, American Academy for the Advancement of Science). Going forward, Dryad aims to further build these connections through institutional memberships. We welcome our newest institutional members, and look forward to growing our membership, to support the costs and data publishing needs of their researchers.

“The features and new capabilities encompassed in our new platform reflect Dryad’s long standing commitment to working with the data sharing community to build a premier data repository service that reflects the evolving needs of researchers, their funders and institutions. I look forward to welcoming new members to this growing global community.”

– Caroline Sutton, Dryad Board Chair

The new Dryad platform is just the beginning for our roadmap to make data publishing both robust and seamless. We have already started building integrations with publishing platforms such as Editorial Manager, ScholarOne, and PubSweet that will enable more journals to integrate with Dryad at the point of article submission.

We will also be working with data analysis and computing spaces like Jupyter, Binder, WholeTale, and rOpenSci to allow for published datasets to be usable within researcher workspaces. To further ensure discoverability of datasets, we are also working with PubMed to allow for Dryad datasets related to articles to be searchable. As we announced earlier this year, we will be building on our partnership with Zenodo that makes software and data publishing a more connected and easy process for both researchers and publishers.

Get involved

The road ahead is exciting and will take us closer to our goal of supporting researchers and making data publishing easier. We invite you to provide user feedback and potential integration discussions.

Check out our Github, follow us on Twitter, and get in touch.