Scaling up. Courtesy of Swamibu via flickr, CC-BY-NC

The US National Science Foundation, through its Advances in Biological Informatics program, has announced a new award of $2.4M over four years to Duke University (NESCent), the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill (Metadata Research Center), and North Carolina State University (Digital Library).

The award will enable Dryad to scale up its technical infrastructure to support the rapidly expanding user base of journals and researchers, ensure that the repository is meeting the needs of that user base, and to complete the transition to a financially independent non-profit organization.

This is one of a new breed of Development Awards being made by ABI, in which the review criteria judge the ability of the project to produce “robust, broadly-adopted cyberinfrastructure” with an emphasis on “user engagement, design quality, engineering practices, management plan, and dissemination”.

Repositories such as Dryad enable researchers to comply with funding agency expectations for long-term data preservation and availability, and we are grateful to NSF for its continuing support of this mission.