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Dryad is thrilled to announce a strategic partnership with California Digital Library (CDL) to address researcher needs by leading an open, community-supported initiative in research data curation and publishing.

Dryad was founded 10 years ago with the mission of providing open, not-for-profit infrastructure for data underlying the scholarly literature, and the vision of promoting a world where research data is openly available and routinely re-used to create knowledge.

20,000 data publications later, that message has clearly resonated. The Dryad model of embedding data publication within journal workflows has proven highly effective, and combined with our data curation expertise, has made Dryad a name that is both known and trusted in the research community. But a lot has changed in the data publishing space since 2008, and Dryad needs to change with it.

Who/what is CDL?

CDL was founded by the University of California in 1997 to take advantage of emerging technologies that were transforming the way digital information was being published and accessed. Since then, in collaboration with the UC libraries and other partners, they have assembled one of the world’s leading digital research libraries and changed the ways that faculty, students, and researchers discover and access information.

CDL has long-standing interest and experience in research data management (RDM) and data publishing. CDL’s digital curation program, the University of California Curation Center (UC3), provides digital preservation, data curation, and data publishing services, and has a history of coordinating collaborative projects regionally, nationally, and internationally. It is baked into CDL’s strategic vision to build partnerships to better promote and make an impact in the library, open research, and data management spaces (e.g., DMPTool, HathiTrust).

Why a partnership?

CDL and Dryad have a shared mission of increasing the adoption and availability of open data. By joining forces, we can have a much bigger impact. This partnership is focused on combining CDL’s institutional relationships, expertise, and nimble technology with Dryad’s position in the researcher community, curation workflows, and publisher relationships. By working together, we plan to create global efficiencies and minimize needless duplication of effort across institutions, freeing up time and funds, and, in particular, allowing institutions with fewer resources to support research data publishing and ensure data remain open.

Our joint Dryad-CDL initiative will increase adoption of open data by meeting researchers where they already are. We will leverage the strengths of both organizations to offer new products and services and to build broad, sustainable, and productive approaches to data curation. We plan to move quickly to provide new value:

• For researchers: We will launch a new, modern and easier-to-use platform. This will provide a higher level of service, and even more seamless integration into regular workflows than Dryad currently offers
• For journals and publishers: We will offer new integration paths that will allow direct communication with manuscript processing systems, better reporting, and more comprehensive curation services
• For academic institutions: We will work directly with institutions to craft right-sized offerings to meet your needs

We have many details to hammer out and a lot of work to do, but among our first steps will be to reach out to you — each of the groups above — to discuss your needs, wants, and preferred methods of supporting this effort. With your help, the partnership will help us grow Dryad as a globally-accessible, community-led, non-commercial, low-cost service that focus on breaking down silos between publishing, libraries, and research.

As this partnership is taking shape, we ask for community input on how our collective efforts can best meet the needs of researchers, publishers, and institutions. Please stay tuned for further announcements and information over the coming months. We hope you share our excitement as we step into Dryad’s next chapter.