A number of enhancements to the repository have been made in recent months, including these three that were in high demand from users:
- First, we have modified our submission process to enable the data to be deposited prior to editorial review of the manuscript. Journals that integrate manuscript and data submission at the review stage can now offer their editors and peer reviewers anonymous access to the data in Dryad while the manuscript is in review. This option is currently being used by several of our partner journals, BMJ Open, Molecular Ecology, and Systematic Biology, and is available to any existing or future integrated journal. Note: authors still begin their data deposit process at the journal.
- Second, when authors submit data associated with previously published articles, they can pull up the article information using the article DOI or its PubMed ID, greatly simplifying the deposition process for legacy data.
- Third, Dryad now supports versioning of datafiles. Authors can upload new versions of their files to correct or update the original file. Once logged in to their Dryad account, the My Submissions option appears under My Account in the left side-menu. Prior unfinished and completed submissions are listed; selecting an archived submission allows the author to add a new file. Note that the earlier versions of the file will still be available to users, but the metadata may be modified to reflect the reason for the update. The DOIs will be appended with a number (e.g., “.1”, “.2”) so that each version can be uniquely referenced. By default, users will be shown the most current version of each datafile. They will be notified of the existence of any previous/subsequent versions.
- Access and download statistics have been displayed for content in the repository since late 2010; Dryad now displays the statistics for an article’s data together on one page so you can see at a glance how many times the page has been viewed and how many times each component data file has been downloaded. Check out this example from Evolutionary Applications.
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