Data Archiving Platforms: Dryad

by Brianna Marshall, Digital Curation Coordinator

This is part two of a three-part series where I explore platforms for archiving and sharing your data. Read the first post in the series, focused on UW’s institutional repository, MINDS@UW.

To help you better understand your options, here are the areas I address for each platform:

  • Background information on who can use it and what type of content is appropriate.
  • Options for sharing and access
  • Archiving and preservation benefits the platform offers
  • Whether the platform complies with the forthcoming OSTP mandate

Dryad

About

Dryad is a repository appropriate for data that accompanies published articles in the sciences or medicine. Many journals partner with Dryad to provide submission integration, which makes linking the data between Dryad and the journal easy for you. Pricing varies depending on the journal you are publishing in; some journals cover the data publishing charge (DPC) while others do not. Read more about Dryad’s pricing model or browse the journals with sponsored DPCs.

Sharing and access

Data uploaded to Dryad are made available for reuse under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. There are no format restrictions to what you upload, though you are encouraged to use community standards if possible. Your data will be given a DOI, enabling you to get credit for sharing.

Archiving and preservation

According to the Dryad website, “Data packages in Dryad are replicated across multiple systems to support failover, improve access times, allow recovery from disk failures, and preserve bit integrity. The data packages are discoverable and backed up for long-term preservation within the DataONE network.”

OSTP mandate

The OSTP mandate requires all federal funding agencies with over $100 million in R&D funds to make greater efforts to make grant-funded research outputs more accessible. This will likely mean that data must be publicly accessible and have an assigned DOI (though you’ll need to check with your funding agency for the exact requirements). As long as the data you need to share is associated with a published article, Dryad is a good candidate for OSTP-compliant data: it mints DOIs and makes data openly available under a CC0 license.

Visit Dryad.

Have additional questions or concerns about where you should archive your data? Contact us.