Nature journals now list Dryad among their suggested data repositories. Citing “an inherent principle of publication is that others should be able to replicate and build upon the authors’ published claims,” the editorial policies mandate data sharing and archiving.

The policy on data sets reads:

A condition of publication in a Nature journal is that authors are required to make materials, data and associated protocols promptly available to others without preconditions.

Data sets must be made freely available to readers from the date of publication, and must be provided to editors and peer-reviewers at submission, for the purposes of evaluating the manuscript.

For the following types of data set, submission to a community-endorsed, public repository is mandatory. Accession numbers must be provided in the paper. Examples of appropriate public repositories are listed below.

PANGAEA (Publishing Network for Geoscientific & Environmental Data) is a repository for geoscience data with many features similar to Dryad, including use of DOIs for data files.  A recent press release reports that Elsevier and PANGAEA have implemented reciprocal linking between data in the repository and journal articles.   Research data sets deposited at PANGAEA are now automatically linked to the corresponding articles in Elsevier journals on its electronic platform ScienceDirect and vice versa.   The data are freely available from the publication’s page in ScienceDirect, without a login or subscription.

Try it out:

1. From this PANGAEA record, follow the DOI to the article in ScienceDirect (citations and abstracts only, unless you or your institution have subscription access)
2. The PANGAEA link is to the right of the article with Supplementary Data beside it

This valuable two-way connectivity between data and article is most easily achieved when the data are captured at the time of article submission.  See this previous post for more on Dryad’s approach to this problem, which is designed to work across multiple publishers.

Similar to the appearance of the PANGAEA logo in the online version of the article, we are toying with the idea of calling attention to the link in the opposite direction by placing  journal cover images next to article DOIs in the Dryad display.  We’d like to hear your thoughts on that.  Is it helpful signage?  Or distracting eye candy?