A number of notable publications have been added to the growing list of those integrating submission of data and manuscripts with Dryad.
The recently adopted Data Policy of Royal Society Publishing now requires that data sets “be deposited in an appropriate, recognized, publicly available repository” and that authors “disclose upon submission of the manuscript any restrictions on the availability of research materials or data.” To support this policy, the Royal Society now sponsors the Data Publication Charge to Dryad for data associated with any of its publications. Proceedings of the Royal Society, Proceedings B, the Royal Society’s flagship biological research journal, has joined Biology Letters in integrating submission with Dryad. Currently, submission of data occurs prior to manuscript review for Proceedings B, and following acceptance for Biology Letters. Watch this space for further efforts to support the data archiving needs of Royal Society Publishing.
In an editorial entitled ‘An open future for ecological and evolutionary data?’, recently published jointly in BMC Ecology and BMC Evolutionary Biology, authors Amye Kenall, Simon Harold and Christopher Foote announce the integration of manuscript submission for these two journals with Dryad in order “to encourage a more widespread adoption of open data sharing in the fields of ecology and evolutionary biology by facilitating this process for our authors.” Now that the technical work has been accomplished for these two journals, submission integration can be easily extended to other BMC series titles at the request of the editors.
Scientific Data is a newly launched open access publication from Nature Publishing Group that aims to promote the accessibility and reuse of scientifically valuable data sets. This is supported by both a strong data deposition policy and a novel publication type called a Data Descriptor.
Data Descriptors will provide detailed descriptions of the experiments and procedures involved in generating important datasets, including essential information needed for scientists to assess the technical quality of the data, reproduce key methods or analysis workflows, and ultimately reuse the data to address important research questions. In addition, every publication at Scientific Data will be supported by metadata describing key properties of the experiments and resulting data, which will be checked by an in-house curator and released in the ISA-tab format, and hopefully other standard formats in the future. These metadata will aid data mining, and will help scientists find and reuse high-quality datasets stored across multiple data repositories.
NPG sponsors data submissions associated with Scientific Data, and data are submitted to Dryad prior to review.
Together with a number of previously integrated journals from German Medical Science and Pensoft Publishers, on subjects ranging from subterranean biology to reconstructive surgery, the total number of titles now integrated with Dryad exceeds 50. Authors may consult this list to see which journals are integrated, when to submit data (either before review of after acceptance), whether the journal allows an optional data embargo, and whether Data Publication Charges are sponsored for that publication.Submission integration is a free service, and can be implemented with a wide variety of manuscript submission systems. We encourage publishers and editors to contact us about integration of additional titles, and we encourage authors to let editors know if this is a feature that they would value.