We are pleased to announce that Biology Letters is the latest journal to integrate submission of manuscripts with data to Dryad.  In this process, the journal and repository communicate behind the scenes in order to streamline data submission for authors and ensure that the article contains a permanent link to the data.

It is particularly apt because Biology Letters is published by the Royal Society, which invented the idea of sharing knowledge through a scientific journal back in 1665.  Scientific communication has come a long way from those early letters among gentleman natural philosophers to the current conception of Science as an Open Enterprise conducted in the public interest.  Reflecting these changes in science and technology, the Royal Society recently strengthened its policy on the availability of research data:

To allow others to verify and build on the work published in Royal Society journals it is a condition of publication that authors make available the data and research materials supporting the results in the article.

Datasets should be deposited in an appropriate, recognized repository and the associated accession number, link or DOI to the datasets must be included in the methods section of the article. Reference(s) to datasets should also be included in the reference list of the article with DOIs (where available). Where no discipline-specific data repository exists authors should deposit their datasets in a general repository such as Dryad.

There are already a healthy number of articles in Biology Letters with associated data in Dryad, including one of last year’s hit data packages, Monsters are people too.  The first to be published via integrated submission is:

Article:

Jevanandam N, Goh AGR, Corlett RT (2013) Climate warming and the potential extinction of fig wasps, the obligate pollinators of figs. Biology Letters 9(3): 20130041. doi:10.1098/rsbl.2013.0041

Data:

Goh AGR, Corlett RT, Jevanandam N (2013) Data from: Climate warming and the potential extinction of fig wasps, the obligate pollinators of figs. Dryad Digital Repository. doi:10.5061/dryad.hj7h2