Credit: adamthelibrarian, from Flickr

This is an important month, because a host of our partner journals are implementing new policies on data archiving, and, in the U.S., the National Science Foundation is asking its new grantees to have explicit data management plans.  There are over 1000 data files from over 50 journals now in Dryad, and much of this content has been submitted only within the past year. Clearly, Dryad’s role in supporting the growing data archiving mandates from journals and funders continues to expand.

New Features
In the past few months, several new features have been added to Dryad.  Users can now save an incomplete submission and come back later to complete it.  They can see a listing of their completed and in progress submissions.  Users can download data citations to their favorite bibliography management programs and upload them to their favorite social bookmarking tools.  A new “faceted search” interface allows users to find data more easily, and also displays related content in other repositories, including ecological and environmental science data (from the Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity) and phylogenetic data (from TreeBASE). To provide an early indication of scientific impact, users can see how often data have been viewed and downloaded.

An important new feature is “handshaking”, which is what we call the process whereby authors upload some of their data to Dryad, and the information is conveyed behind-the-scenes to a specialized repository. The aim of handshaking is to reduce the time and effort need to deposit data when there are different repositories managing different aspects of the data.  Handshaking also enables persistent linkages among data in the different repositories. As a first foray into handshaking, we now offer users the option of initiating a deposit in TreeBASE, the primary repository for published phylogenetic data, whenever a NEXUS file is uploaded to Dryad.  Alternatively, the option is available to deposit in another repository first, and report the identifiers to Dryad to ensure that users can find all the data relevant to a given article.  We will be working in the months ahead to handshake with other specialized repositories required by our partner journals.

See our recent blog post about these features for more details.

Data Deposit in Three Easy Steps: The Movie
Are you looking for a way to show a colleague how straightforward data archiving can be?  We’ve added a short (2-minute) video to the site that walks users through the deposit process in three easy steps.  The video also available at SciVee.

Journals Implement Joint Data Archiving Policy
Starting this month, a number of Dryad partner journals have implemented a Joint Data Archiving Policy that requires, as a condition of publication, that authors deposit the data underlying their article in a public repository.  Some of the journals implementing this policy include: The American Naturalist, Evolution, Evolutionary Applications, Heredity, Journal of Evolutionary Biology, and Molecular Ecology. A recent TREE article by Michael Whitlock suggests how “data generators, data re-users, and journals can maximize the fairness and scientific value of data archiving.”

A growing number of journals now integrate their submission process with Dryad, meaning that the repository and journal exchange information to facilitate the author’s data deposition process and to ensure persistent linkage between articles and data. The current list includes The American Naturalist, The Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, Evolution, Journal of Evolutionary Biology, Journal of Heredity, Molecular Ecology, and Molecular Ecology Resources. And more are on the way (stay tuned).

NSF Data Management Plan Mandate
Starting this month, the U.S. National Science Foundation is requiring grant applicants to provide a data management plan describing how data will be collected, preserved and made available, and these plans will be subject to peer review.  We encourage applicants to leverage Dryad in their data management plans as a solution for the long-term preservation and dissemination of the data associated with their publications.  There are some pointers to resources for data management planning on the Dryad website.

Dryad UK Project
The Joint Information Science Committee (JISC) in the UK has made an award to Dryad and through Oxford University and the British Library to expand the scope of the journals involved, including into the areas of infectious disease and epidemiology, and to create a UK mirror of Dryad.  More information is here and at the Dryad UK site.

New Twitter Feed for Data Deposits
Interested in keeping up with new data available in Dryad?  Follow our Twitter feed (@datadryadnew) or subscribe to our RSS feed. We also Tweet general news about the repository and the world of data science as @datadryad.

Browse and search the repository at http://datadryad.org/
Follow Dryad on Twitter http://twitter.com/datadryad

This blog post is the first issue of the Dryad newsletter, summarizing recent achievements and milestones of the data repository.  If you’d like to receive future newsletters by email, please sign up for the Dryad Users mailing list.