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Archive for the ‘Governance’ Category

Submission fees to be introduced in September 2013

Posted in Data availability, Data curation, Funding, Governance, Meetings, New features, Uncategorized on 2013/04/29 | Leave a Comment »

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Dryad is a nonprofit organization fully committed to making scientific and medical research data permanently available to all researchers and educators free-of-charge without barriers to reuse.  For the past four years, we have engaged experts and consulted with our many stakeholders in order to develop a sustainability plan that will ensure Dryad’s content remains free to users indefinitely.  The resulting plan allows Dryad to recoup its operating costs in a way that recovers revenues fairly and in a scalable manner.  The plan includes revenue from submission fees, membership dues, grants and contributions.

A one-time submission fee will offset the actual costs of preserving data in Dryad.  The majority of costs are incurred at the time of submission when curators process new files, and long-term storage costs scale with each submission, so this transparent one-time charge ensures that resources scale with demand.  Dryad offers a variety of pricing plans for journals and other organizations such societies, funders and libraries to purchase discounted submission fees on behalf of their researchers.  For data packages not covered by a pricing plan, the researcher pays upon submission.  Waivers are provided to researchers from developing economies.  See Pricing Plans for a complete list of fees and payment options.  Submission fees will apply to all new submissions starting September 2013.

Membership dues will supplement submission fees, allowing Dryad to maintain its strong ties to the research community through its volunteer Board of Directors, Annual Membership Meetings, and  other outreach activities to researchers, educators and stakeholder organizations.  See Membership Information.

Grants will fund research, development and innovation.

Donations will support all of the above efforts.  In addition, Dryad will occasionally appeal to donors to fund special projects or specific needs, such as preservation of valuable legacy datasets and deposit waivers for researchers from developing economies.

We are grateful for all the input we have received into our sustainability plan, and look forward to your continued support in carrying out our nonprofit mission for many long years to come.

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Stakeholder governance

Posted in Governance, tagged on 2012/06/15 | 1 Comment »

“The scientific, educational, and charitable mission of Dryad is to promote the availability of data underlying findings in the scientific literature for research and educational reuse. The vision of Dryad is a scholarly communication system in which learned societies, publishers, institutions of research and education, funding bodies and other stakeholders collaboratively sustain and promote the preservation and reuse of data underlying the scholarly literature.”

This Mission Statement is from Dryad’s new Bylaws, which were approved this month by a vote of its Interim Partners. Since its inception, Dryad been guided by the idea that an enduring community resource requires stakeholder governance, and the Bylaws set out the structure of the membership-based organization by which that will be achieved.

The new governance structure vests financial and legal responsibility with a Board of Directors elected by the Membership. Members may include journals, scientific societies, publishers, funding agencies, universities and any other organization that shares an interest in Dryad’s mission. The twelve Directors serve as individuals, not necessarily affiliated with a Member, and serve – on a voluntary basis – for renewable three-year terms.

A diverse and distinguished list of twenty candidates accepted the nomination to run for the charter Board of Directors in an election held this May. The following twelve individuals were elected to assume office on the 1st of July 2012, and serve terms varying from one to three years.

  • Theodora Bloom, Public Library of Science
  • Lee Dirks, Microsoft Research
  • Simon Hodson, JISC
  • Marcel Holyoak, University of California, Davis
  • Brian Lavoie, OCLC Research
  • William Michener, University of New Mexico
  • Allen J. Moore, University of Georgia
  • Susanna-Assunta Sansone, University of Oxford
  • Eefke Smit, International Association of STM Publishers
  • Todd Vision, Biology Dept., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  • Michael Whitlock, University of British Columbia

The first face-to-face Board Meeting will be held this July in Durham, North Carolina, and the first annual Members Meeting will be held in May 2013. More background on the history and current status of Dryad’s governance is available at http://wiki.datadryad.org/Governance.

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Summer 2011 Interim Board meeting

Posted in Governance, Meetings, Policy, tagged on 2012/06/15 | 1 Comment »

Dryad’s new governance structure and cost recovery plan emerged from a consultation process that culminated in a meeting of the Dryad Interim Board in Vancouver, Canada in July 2011.  This was the third and final meeting of this temporary governing body. Over 25 representatives from a diversity of journals, societies, publishers and other organizations met at the University of British Columbia to review progress and chart the next steps for Dryad.

Vancouver maple tree, courtesy of Marcel Holyoak, via Flickr

In addition to the governance and sustainability plans, participants also made progress on a number of important policy issues. Several of these bear on what content Dryad will accept:

  • Software: Dryad is intended to provide a repository for code only where it does not otherwise have a better home. It is expected that Dryad will be used primarily for snapshots or “one-off” scripts that would otherwise be lost, rather than the maintenance of ongoing software projects that would be better hosted by a public version control system.
  • Other integral and supplementary materials:  Dryad will accept the full range of content that is currently hosted by the journal/publisher as Supplemental Online Material, and not restrict the repository contents strictly to data. This option will be provided to those journals or publishers that wish to take advantage of it.  Whether it be software, data, or other material, authors will still be asked to release rights to the content under the terms of CCZero.
  • Qualifying publications:  All content in Dryad must be documented by a publication. The Interim Board expanded the definition of qualifying publications to include not just those that have undergone peer review, but any legitimate publication with expert vetting, such as a doctoral thesis.

The report of the meeting is available here.   We extend particular thanks for the success of the meeting to the members of the interim Executive Committee: Marcel Holyoak, William Michener, Allen Moore and Michael Whitlock (chair and host at UBC).

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