- Dryad (repository)
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Dryad is a disciplinary repository for data underlying peer-reviewed articles in the basic and applied biosciences, including biomedicine. Dryad aims to allow scientists to validate published findings, explore new analysis methodologies, re-purpose data for research questions unanticipated by the original authors, and perform synthetic studies such as formal meta-analyses. For many publications, existing data repositories do not capture the whole data package. As a result, many important datasets are not being preserved and are no longer available, or usable, at the time that they are sought by later investigators. [1]
Dryad 
Initial release January 2008 Stable release 1.9 / March 31, 2011 Development status Active Written in Java Operating system Cross-platform Type Disciplinary repository License New BSD license Website http://datadryad.org Dryad serves as a repository for tables, spreadsheets, flat files, and all other kinds of published data for which specialized repositories do not already exist. Optimally, authors submit data to Dryad in conjunction with article publication, so that links to the data can be included in the published article. All data files in Dryad are associated with a published article, and are made available for reuse under the terms of a Creative Commons Zero waiver.
Contents
Features
Dryad enables authors, journals, societies and publishers to facilitate data archiving at the time of publication, when the data are readily available. Data in Dryad receives a permanent, unique Digital object identifier (DOI), which can be included in the published article so that readers are able to access the data. Authors can archive data in Dryad and be assured of its preservation, while satisfying journals' and research funding agencies' mandates to disseminate their research outputs. [2]
Authors submit data to Dryad either when the associated article is under review or has been accepted for publication. The choice depends on whether the journal includes data within the scope of peer reviewer. Authors may also submit data after an article has been published.
Data submission is facilitated by journals sending notices of new manuscripts to Dryad. This saves authors from having to re-enter the bibliographic details when they upload their data files.
Dryad curators review submitted data files and performs quality control on metadata descriptions before inclusion of new content in the repository. Dryad metadata emphasizes simplicity and interoperability, using many elements from the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative and other registered metadata schemes. The Metadata Research Center at the University of North Carolina is developing approaches to automatically generate metadata to describe data in Dryad [3].
Dryad cooordinates data submission to specialized repositories where in order to (a) lower user burden by streamlining the submission workflow and (b) allow Dryad and specialized repositories to exchange identifiers and other metadata in order to enable cross-referencing of the different data products associated with a given publication. The first two handshaking partners are TreeBASE and GenBank, which Dryad's partner journals have previously identified as required points of deposition for phylogenetic tree data and DNA sequences, respectively.
Governance, history and funding
The repository is overseen by the Dryad Consortium Board, which is composed of representatives from partner journals. The Consortium coordinates data sharing policies and promotes the long-term sustainability of the repository, together with other stakeholders such as publishers, scientific societies, funding agencies, and other data centers.
Dryad emerged from a National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) workshop entitled "Digital data preservation, sharing, and discovery: Challenges for Small Science Communities in the Digital Era" in May 2007. Initial funding for Dryad was provided by the National Science Foundation to the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center and other partners in the US.
DryadUK is a JISC-funded project run from the British Library and the University of Oxford, in partnership with NESCent, the Digital Curation Centre, and Charles Beagrie Ltd. The project has led to a UK mirror of the Dryad repository based at the British Library. The project also aims to improve the tools available for the publication and citation of data, expand the disciplinary range of participating journals, and further develop the business framework for an international organization dedicated to long-term data preservation.
Dryad is a member of the Data Observation Network for Earth (DataONE).
Software
Dryad is built upon the open source DSpace repository software, developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Hewlett-Packard. Many customizations have been integrated into the main DSpace codebase; customizations specific to Dryad are maintained in the open source Dryad code repository.
See also
References
- ^ Vision, T.J. (2010) Open Data and the Social Contract of Scientific Publishing. BioScience 60(5):330-330. DOI:10.1525/bio.2010.60.5.2
- ^ Data Archiving. Michael C. Whitlock, Mark A. McPeek, Mark D. Rausher, Loren Rieseberg and Allen J. Moore, The American Naturalist, Vol. 175, No. 2 (February 2010), pp. 145-146 DOI:10.1086/650340
- ^ Greenberg, J., White, H., C, Carrier, C. and Scherle, R. (2009). A Metadata Best Practice for a Scientific Data Repository. Journal of Library Metadata, 9:3, 194—212. doi:10.1080/19386380903405090
External links
Categories:- Biological databases
- Discipline-oriented digital libraries
- Repositories
- Disciplinary repository
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