“The scientific, educational, and charitable mission of Dryad is to promote the availability of data underlying findings in the scientific literature for research and educational reuse. The vision of Dryad is a scholarly communication system in which learned societies, publishers, institutions of research and education, funding bodies and other stakeholders collaboratively sustain and promote the preservation and reuse of data underlying the scholarly literature.”

This Mission Statement is from Dryad’s new Bylaws, which were approved this month by a vote of its Interim Partners. Since its inception, Dryad been guided by the idea that an enduring community resource requires stakeholder governance, and the Bylaws set out the structure of the membership-based organization by which that will be achieved.

The new governance structure vests financial and legal responsibility with a Board of Directors elected by the Membership. Members may include journals, scientific societies, publishers, funding agencies, universities and any other organization that shares an interest in Dryad’s mission. The twelve Directors serve as individuals, not necessarily affiliated with a Member, and serve – on a voluntary basis – for renewable three-year terms.

A diverse and distinguished list of twenty candidates accepted the nomination to run for the charter Board of Directors in an election held this May. The following twelve individuals were elected to assume office on the 1^st of July 2012, and serve terms varying from one to three years.

• Theodora Bloom, Public Library of Science
• Lee Dirks, Microsoft Research
• Simon Hodson, JISC
• Marcel Holyoak, University of California, Davis
• Brian Lavoie, OCLC Research
• William Michener, University of New Mexico
• Allen J. Moore, University of Georgia
• Susanna-Assunta Sansone, University of Oxford
• Eefke Smit, International Association of STM Publishers
• Todd Vision, Biology Dept., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• Michael Whitlock, University of British Columbia

The first face-to-face Board Meeting will be held this July in Durham, North Carolina, and the first annual Members Meeting will be held in May 2013. More background on the history and current status of Dryad’s governance is available at http://wiki.datadryad.org/Governance.