Melissanne Scheld, Executive Director, takes time to reflect on the Dryad/CDL partnership and to share thoughts on the direction of this collaborative effort.

It’s been a fast two months since I joined Dryad at this pivotal and exciting juncture. As previously announced, this spring Dryad entered into a formal partnership with California Digital Library (CDL) to ensure long-term sustainability for Dryad and to reinforce two essential,  shared goals:

1. Create sustainability for open-source, community-owned, data curation & publication infrastructure
2. Drive adoption of curated data publishing in the research community.

Where we are

For the past decade, Dryad has served as a highly regarded, non-profit, curated repository for data research across disciplines. None of that is changing!

Going forward we need to better meet researchers within their own workflows. We need to make the action of submitting research data even easier so that it becomes a seamless step within the publishing process.

We are currently working to migrate the Dryad system onto CDL’s Dash platform. Using an Agile framework, developers from both Dryad and CDL are collaborating to build an open-source, nimble service that will offer a higher level of administrative functionality, an improved curation layer, and various submission options.

Where we’re going

Researchers will find our new offering continues to meet funder requirements and sets the bar in best practices for data sharing. Using the FAIR data principles as a guide, the curation we perform on each dataset deposited eases findability and usability, while the new levels of enhanced integrations we plan to develop (more on this below) will further improve submitters’ workflows.

For institutions, we want to offer an infrastructure that supports local research data management through features including campus single sign-on, bespoke reporting, integration with local repositories, and campus co-branding. The global network of libraries, which CDL is part of, will help us reach a wider range institutions that are also looking for data management solutions.

Dryad has always had strong publisher support; our new offering will improve these partnerships through enhanced API integrations. Going forward we will build upon our publishing partners while also working with platform providers to develop direct integrations. This will provide a more automated submission process around the transmission of metadata and DOIs.

We want to build modular infrastructure that is future-proof. We should be thinking about data publishing both as its own entity and in conjunction with article publishing. There are many avenues for circulating research and data publishing should be a part of all of these. Publishing data should be as ‘easy’ and ‘standardized‘ as article publishing.

Along with more robust infrastructure, we need to rethink how we build Dryad’s sustainability.  As a small, lean, non-profit, we need to build financial models that don’t overburden any single segment of our community, but still allow us to support the high level of curation and preservation infrastructure for which Dryad is known.

We are currently market testing new models within our community and have been talking with institutions and publishers to hear how we can best support their data publishing needs and what shared costs might look like. We know that there has been a lot of talk lately in our wider community about membership models; early feedback from our partners indicates this is still the most favorable method for investing in long-term sustainability.

What will success look like for us?  

The Dryad/CDL partnership aims to create a self-sustaining, curated, digital data repository for researchers across all fields of inquiry, based on the needs of and supported by institutional and publisher community members. We are building from a strong foundation, have created a thoughtful roadmap through community feedback, and are confident we are on a pathway to sustainability.

Personally, I’m very excited about all of these changes and know that, in partnership with CDL, we will be able to better serve our community. I look forward to updating you on future developments, but in the meantime, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at director@datadryad.org with any questions or comments.