At a moment defined by uncertainty, skepticism, and especially tight resources, Open Data offers a practical, powerful way to strengthen research, rebuild confidence in the scholarly record, increase efficiency, and accelerate discovery. Dryad is uniquely positioned to help researchers realize that potential.
The challenges of our moment
For researchers, institutions, funders, publishers, nonprofits, and service providers of all stripes, the future feels uncertain.
In the US, federal cuts are impacting individual researchers and institutions alike. Nelson Memo requirements are being implemented inconsistently across agencies, creating confusion for researchers and librarians. Federal data shows a 19% drop in the number of international student arrivals.
While the challenges in the US feel perhaps the most sudden, similar trends are playing out in many countries. UKRI allocations are down, leading some UK universities to scale back scientific research. In 2024 Australian research funding fell to a 30-year low as a percentage of GDP. Just last month, the country’s leading research agency CSIRO announced plans to cut between 300-350 research roles. Even in the EU, where Horizon Europe has announced ambitious goals for the future, researchers in The Netherlands and France face cutbacks.
These funding cuts are real and immediate, but they are just the most recent tangible outcome of the long-term devaluation of science and scholarship in society. Attitudes toward research began shifting well before the pandemic. In some cases, lowered confidence in research outcomes is evidence-based (the reproducibility crisis of the early 2010s seriously shook the research community, and led to the establishment of new standards and best practices for documentation).
But declining public trust in research is more than that. It’s the result of a broad and growing distrust of established institutions and authority figures across all contexts, be they governmental, media, military, clinical, academic, religious, or other. For science in particular, that sense has been exacerbated and politically coded by the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the turmoil of this moment, Open Data might feel like an issue of secondary concern. Faced with slashed funding, uncertainty about the future, and the erosion of public trust in science, setting the nuances of scholarly communication to one side is an understandable impulse. But the fact is, Open Data, and the open infrastructure that supports it, is more vital now than it has ever been.
The promise of Open Data
Open Science offers a robust toolkit for meeting the challenges of this moment, and owing to the role of data as the primary expression of research results, Open Data is arguably the most powerful tool of them all.
Publishing Open Data supports reproducibility and third party verification, increasing both the quality of research and readers’ confidence in results. For a public now intent on seeing how the sausage is made, access to research data demonstrates credibility, positive intent, and the ultimate validity of the findings. Equally important, Open Data publication enables data reuse, which in turn increases efficiency, speed, and overall research productivity, maximizing the impact of increasingly scarce grant dollars.
But for Open Data to realize its potential to build trust and streamline research, data must be shared in a way that allows other researchers to find, access, and understand it. Releasing public datasets without meaningful metadata or broad indexing renders them effectively invisible — as useless to readers and scholars as if they were still languishing on a private hard drive at the back of a drawer in some lab.
Open infrastructures make vision into reality
Open infrastructures like Dryad have a vital role to play in ensuring that data are truly accessible and useful to readers and scholars. Dryad’s hands-on curation service and best-in-class data publication platform ensure no research data goes to waste. Our team works one-on-one with authors to ensure that all the data we publish are findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). Dryad’s platform meets rigorous independent preservation standards, with replicated copies in multiple geographic locations, keeping data available in perpetuity. With powerful search, indexing and cross reference, Dryad datasets are widely discoverable and intelligently linked to other published research outputs, such as articles and code, to create a complete picture of each investigation.
Foundational infrastructure is often invisible, or so routine a part of daily life and work that we barely think about it. In the world of scholarly communications, we reference DOIs and search PMC in the same way we switch on a light or drive down a paved road in the wider world. But just like those basic utilities and services, scholarly infrastructure takes resources, and requires maintenance and support to continue functioning.
In the face of rising financial pressure, it’s vital that we continue to support the essential infrastructures that make scholarly communication possible and empower researchers to magnify their research, improve their accuracy, and exert outsized impact on their fields.
Openness is not a luxury for calmer days but a critical part of the solution to the problems we now face. In times like these, FAIR and open data publishing can make the difference between whether an advance is achieved or not; whether a university research program remains sustainable or not; and whether the scholarly research system as a whole is able to continue to advance with more limited resources.
For those of us who make up the research support network there is practical work to be done here. We must advocate for investment in infrastructure, communicate the importance of the standards and best practices we uphold, and – most importantly – ensure we have a strong grasp on the specific value we hold for the community and then deliver on it.
The importance of Dryad
With 50 million curated data files available today and preserved for the long-term, Dryad is a critical component of the global network supporting research by delivering Open Data. Our partners – institutions and independent research organizations, academic societies, and publishing organizations – invest in Dryad to provide the support and expertise researchers need to prepare data for open sharing and reuse. Join the effort by becoming a Dryad partner, or contributing to our support.