Science is international.  Science publishing is international.  And so it stands to reason that science data repositories should be international as well.

We are pleased to report that the Joint Information Science Committee (JISC) in the UK has made an award to the Dryad project through its Managing Research Data Program.  Through this program, JISC seeks to ” fund projects to explore and pilot innovative technical and organizational models for enhanced research data publications… to stimulate the better management, more open sharing and easier reuse of research data.”

The UK partners in the project include Oxford University and the British Library (BL), with participation from the Digital Curation Centre, Charles Beagrie Ltd, and a number of major scientific publishing houses. The director of the project, Dr. David Shotton at Oxford, heads the Image Bioinformatics Research Group (IBRG) at Oxford, and has been a leader in the application of Web and Semantic Web technologies to enhance biological research data and publications.

The project will result in a UK mirror of the Dryad repository based at the BL, improve the tools available for the publication and citation of data, expand the disciplinary range of participating journals (particularly into epidemiology and infectious diseases), and further develop the business framework for an international organization dedicated to long-term data preservation.

The proposal (PDF here) emerged out of a Dryad-UK discussion meeting cosponsored by the Research Information Network, and held in London in April 2010.