Dryad welcomes the U.S. White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memorandum on ensuring free, immediate, and equitable access. As a platform for the curation and open publication of data serving the research community since 2008, Dryad is well-positioned to support research communities that will rapidly need to develop research management strategies in response to the policy and to augment capacity for institutions and publishers confronting a coming wave of open research outputs. 

The memorandum requires United States (U.S.) federal granting bodies to develop and implement new policies making all tax-payer funded scholarly research and underlying raw data freely and publicly available without embargo by 2026. In addition to removing the embargo period for public access to research articles, the memorandum also significantly strengthens the data sharing plans of its 2013 predecessor by requiring that data underlying peer-reviewed research articles be made immediately available upon publication. 

The updated policy sets high expectations for federal agencies to improve research integrity and reproducibility by:

1. requiring immediate, open deposit of data underlying scholarly research,
2. instructing agencies to develop plans for open deposit of data not associated with a publication,
3. encouraging the use of repositories that align with the National Science and Technology Council’s (NSTC) “Desirable Characteristics of Data Repositories for Federally Funded Research”, and
4. calling for these open outputs to be described with robust metadata, including author and co-author information, publication date, and persistent identifiers.

The curation and publishing services Dryad offers to researchers already align with the key provisions outlined above.

1. After undergoing our careful curation process, all data published with Dryad are made immediately available under a CC0 license.
2. Dryad accepts data regardless of its connection to a published research article, and makes it easy to connect datasets with other research outputs, including articles, software, data management plans, and supplemental information using their persistent identifiers. 
3. Dryad already aligns with the NSTC’s “Desirable Characteristics of Data Repositories for Federally Funded Research. ” Learn more about how in our recent blog post.
4. Dryad supports the DataCite metadata schema and uses persistent identifier registries including the Research Organization Registry (ROR), ORCID, and Crossref’s Funder Registry to link datasets with their producers and funders.

We look forward to the opportunity to work with the research community to support compliance with the new policy and build a more open, transparent, and equitable future for taxpayer-funded research. 

Feedback and questions are always welcome, to hello@datadryad.org. 

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