The Dryad community is expanding and diversifying! We’re excited to announce both the addition of a new institutional member and the results of our recent Board of Directors election.

New international institutional member

KAUST (The King Abdullah University of Science and Technology) has officially joined Dryad, thus furthering their aspirations to “be a destination for scientific and technological education and research.”We hope KAUST will be the first of many global research institutions to join under our newly-launched institutional membership model.

To find out more and join yourself, go to datadryad.org/join.

Newly-elected Board members

Dryad Board of Directors elections are held annually, in conjunction with our member meeting. BOD members are elected or re-elected each year by the membership to serve 3-year terms. Our 12-member Board is meant to represent the various stakeholders in the Dryad community — publishers, researchers, technologists, funders, libraries and others.

Two of our current BOD members were eligible to run for a second term, and were re-elected to the Class of 2022. We’re thrilled to have Jennifer Lin and Johan Nilsson continue in their roles.

Meanwhile, please join us in welcoming two brand-new members to the Board:

Catriona MacCallum

Catriona MacCallum is Director of Open Science at Hindawi Ltd, London, UK. She has almost 20 years experience in scholarly publishing and 15 years in Open Access Publishing. She initially worked as Editor of Trends in Ecology & Evolution for Elsevier before joining the Open-Access publisher PLOS in 2003 to launch PLOS Biology as one of the Senior Editors. She also acted as a Consulting Editor on PLOS ONE, leaving PLOS as Advocacy Director in 2017. She is currently a member of the European Commission’s Open Science Policy Platform and the UKRI Open Access Practitioners Group.  She also serves on the Royal Society Board (Publishing), and is on the newly launched steering committee of DORA. She is a founding individual of I4OC (the Initiative for Open Citations) campaign. She has a PhD (on speciation) from the University of Edinburgh.

Naomi Penfold. Photo credit: Orquidea Real Photobook – Julieta Sarmiento Photography

As Associate Director of ASAPbio, a non-profit organization promoting transparency and innovation in life sciences communication, Naomi Penfold is leading activities to engage the research community to promote the productive use of preprints in biology. She navigates the relationships between publishers, funders, researchers and consumers of science in order to drive innovation in the communication of life sciences research. Naomi is a CEFP2019 fellow with the AAAS’s Community Engagement Fellowship Programme, run by Lou Woodley and colleagues at the Center for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement. She learns and contributes to open science advocacy and innovation as an OpenCon alumnus, Mozilla Science community contributor and through advisory and organising roles with multiple open science projects (OpenAsInBook club; PREreview) and events (ResearchObject 2018 workshop; Open Access week 2018; OpenCon 2017). Prior to joining ASAPbio, Naomi worked as Innovation Officer (2016-2018) and Events Coordinator (2016) with eLife, and was a Wellcome Trust science policy intern with the Academy of Medical Sciences in the UK. Naomi graduated with a PhD in Clinical Biochemistry from the University of Cambridge in 2017.
Further information: https://asapbio.org/dt_team/naomi-penfold

Catriona and Naomi will assume their duties starting at the next BOD meeting in August.

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Lastly, a note of enormous gratitude to outgoing BOD member Alf Eaton, and also to Charles Fox, a long-serving Dryad Director and our outgoing Chair. We couldn’t have done it without you!