Dryad’s Enhanced Features for Data + Related Research Objects

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At Dryad we continue to focus on the two key pillars of data publishing: curation of data as well as seamlessly easy workflows. We are committed to designing solutions centered on meeting researchers’ needs for easy and responsible data publication. Understanding that research data is one component of open science, we have prioritized partnerships and integrations that allow for Dryad to continue focusing on curated research data while providing support for non-data objects submitted in tandem. In February, we launched the first of our Zenodo integrations allowing for software related to Dryad datasets to be published with proper license and citation. Soon after, we got moving on collaboration with one of our new partners, Open Knowledge Foundation and the Frictionless Data team, to explore automated data quality checks. Thinking through the evolving needs of researchers in publishing their data and other works, as well as our work ahead with Frictionless Data and Zenodo, we recognized the need to modernize and upgrade our submission interface and underlying technologies.

We are excited to share our enhanced upload features at Dryad

Dryad’s new interface, using a React framework, combines all types of uploads on one page, making it clear what types of files researchers would like to submit and which ones will be triaged and published at Zenodo. This allows for Dryad to now accept multiple types of related works for submitted datasets: software and now supplementary information. Because of our deep roots with publishers, we have long accepted supplementary files like figures and non-data that do not require or are not applicable for curation or a CC0 license. We are thrilled to be able to better support these submissions, in addition to code and software that are related to Dryad datasets.

Users are now welcome to upload data, or data plus any combination of software and/or supplementary information

Like with our previous release, these related files are queued up at Zenodo, available in our private for peer review access URL, and published in conjunction with the dataset

And the related identifiers are automatically added to the related works on the Dryad landing page as well as further linked up in our metadata that we send to DataCite

These enhancements allow for us to immediately support our submitting authors, but also allows for us to build on a more nimble framework for our future feature releases: we are busy developing our integration with Frictionless Data to auto-validate tabular data files submitted to Dryad for curation, and we are gearing up for our summer of journal integrations with eJournalPress and Editorial Manager.

As always, if you have any feedback or feature ideas that we should consider for supporting best practices in data and software publishing, please get in touch.