Duke University, in collaboration with North Carolina State University and University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, is awarded a grant to enhance the services provided by Dryad (http://datadryad.org), a recently launched repository for data underlying the findings in the scholarly bioscience literature. 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. In a short time, dozens of journals have adopted Dryad as a mechanism for data archiving, and the repository is now at a point of transition to a sustainable organization that has the capacity to make thousands of new datasets each year openly available for reuse in perpetuity. Technical and organizational innovations supported by this award will enhance the Dryad's scalability and sustainability. The technical goals include: automation of metadata curation and preservation tasks; developing more efficient and scalable processes to integrate the manuscript submission processes of journals with the data submission process of Dryad; enhancing the features and usability of the deposition interface; and improving the machine and human interfaces for filtering, searching and accessing repository contents. Dryad?s business model will be refined through evaluation of the costs and benefits of data archiving and data reuse to stakeholders, and continued evaluation of Dryad's role with respect to the many emergent technologies in the world of publishing and data repositories. Dryad's sustainability will be addressed by implementing a nonprofit governance and revenue model that has been developed over the past three years by diverse stakeholders in the research, publishing, library and funder communities.
The Broader Impacts of Dryad stem from its 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 are incentivized to 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 incentivize 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. This award will provide resources for Dryad to to reach out to the next generation of researchers through educational initiatives and partnerships with the broader community. As new journal and funder mandates raise demand and expectations for data management, preservation, and dissemination services, Dryad - as a stable, community-governed organization - aims to be in a position to provide the necessary infrastructure, as well as provide a focused forum for participating journals, societies and publishers to take coordinated, and well-informed, steps toward improved policy and practice.
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