There is debate about and interest in making the archiving of research and monitoring data at universally accessible locations both easy and common. Here Peggy Schaffer presents information on the work of the Dryad initiative to promote this. Read on and why not join the debate - post a comment about your views on universal data archiving below.
When you publish your research, do you also publish the data behind it? A digital repository known as Dryad (datadryad.org) enables authors publishing in all branches of biology to archive and publish their data.
Depositing your data files in a data repository ensures that they will be permanently preserved and publicly available for other scientists. Data archiving enables scientists to validate published findings, explore new analysis methodologies, repurpose data for research questions unanticipated by the original authors, and perform synthetic studies.
The goals of Dryad are:
- To preserve the underlying data reported in a paper at the time of publication, when there is the greatest incentive and ability for authors to share their data.
- To assign globally unique identifiers (DOI's) to datasets, thus enabling data citations.
- To allow end-users to perform sophisticated searches over data (not only by publication, but also by taxon, geography, geological age, biological concept, etc).
- To allow journals and societies to pool their resources for one shared repository.
- To enable bidirectional search and retrieval with data repositories from related disciplines.
- To lower the burden of data sharing by providing one-stop data-deposition via handshaking with specialized repositories.
Many prominent journals have adopted the Joint Data Archiving Policy (JDAP) requiring data archiving at publication, and many UK funding agencies have mandates about making data publicly available. Dryad supports and facilitates the implementation of these policies.
Dryad is currently accepting voluntary submissions of data associated with any article in the biosciences that has been published, or accepted for publication. The advantages to authors of depositing data in Dryad include:
- Visibility: Making your data available online (and linking it back to the publication) provides a new pathway for others to learn about your work.
- Citability: all data you deposit will receive a persistent, resolvable, identifier that can be used in a citation, and listed on your CV. Data citation and re-use can be tracked in the same way as for print publications;Citable data is associated with increased citation rate [1]
- Workload reduction: if you receive individual requests for data, you can simply direct them to the items in Dryad.
- Preservation: your data files will be permanently and safely archived in perpetuity.
- Impact: you will garner citations through the reuse of your data, and you can monitor the use of your data through Dryad's usage statistics (available for each data file in the repository).
Dryad is governed by a consortium of journals that collaboratively promote data archiving and ensure the sustainability of the repository. Additional societies and journals are invited to join the consortium at any time.
For more information please:
- check out the Dryad Website
- peruse the Dryad project wiki
- read the Dryad Blog
- follow Dryad on Twitter
- contact the Dryad team or subscribe to the Dryad users mailing list: help@nescent.org
- contact Todd Vision, Dryad project director or Peggy Schaeffer, Communications Coordinator
[1] Piwowar HA, Day RS, Fridsma DB (2007) Sharing Detailed Research Data Is Associated with Increased Citation Rate. PLoS ONE 2(3): e308. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000308
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