In keeping with our principles of transparency, Dryad has recently released its 2024 Annual Report, featuring updates from our leadership, progress over the course of the fiscal year, and financial information. Read on for highlights, or download the full report from github.

Milestones and ongoing progress

2024 capped three years of intensive community research and collaborative work led by our stakeholder taskforce, investigating stakeholder needs, wants, and capacity. That work culminated in 2025 with the development of our new partner program. The updated approach is designed to provide for Dryad’s future health as an organization and position us to meet growing demand for data-sharing, while keeping fees reasonable for researchers and partner organizations.

Among our proudest accomplishments during the fiscal year has been the growth of that partner community. Dryad welcomed 14 new partners including institutions, publishing organizations, and academic societies.

We also established a working group to delved into the needs and norms of large datasets, an increasingly key aspect of service based on the current trajectory of research, which we hope to increase in future.

We saw a steady rate of data publication as compared with prior year, with 5,567 new datasets released on Dryad between July 2023 and June 2024. Among the most-prolific contributors were researchers publishing in Science, Royal Society Open Science, and PLOS ONE. Their data publications spanned all data formats and fields of research.

Through our work as part of NIH’s Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI), we provided reference materials and educational resources to help researchers achieve data-sharing success with even greater ease and frequency.

The meaning of progress

“As global scientific communities navigate the complexities of data sharing and analysis in an increasingly interconnected world, Dryad’s commitment to high-quality curation and open access remains foundational,” wrote outgoing Board Chair Jason Williams, in his introduction to the report.

The 2024 report describes meaningful progress in our efforts to normalize, facilitate, and empower open data availability and routine reuse for the benefit of all — and through open data, ultimately to advance reproducibility, trust, and the speed of discovery. It’s one vital aspect of a global, industry-wide effort to reshape scientific communications in ways that better serve research, researchers, and the public.

But it takes ingenuity, versatility, and responsiveness. As Executive Director Jen Gibson wrote, in her own introductory statement: “Advancing broad-spectrum practices for data-sharing and reuse is work at the frontier of open science and at the nexus where research results meet the latest technology to build upon them.” Dryad has come far in the 18 years since our founding. We anticipate that progress will accelerate in the coming years, as data publication becomes an increasingly standard feature of research communication, bringing with it new challenges of policy, infrastructure, and scale.