Written by Dan Edwards, Head of Data Publishing, and Maria Guerreiro, Head of Partnership Development

As the demand and opportunity to share research data intensifies across disciplines, a particular kind of editorial expertise is coming into focus: the Data Editor.

At Dryad, collaboration with journal editors and support for peer reviewers is at the core of what we do. No less than 94% of the data published with Dryad over the years is connected with a research article. 2,500 journals have sent authors to Dryad to share data. And, 63% of new submissions to Dryad enter via our Private for Peer Review service. Yet, while open access to the data underpinning published studies makes it possible to verify results, this work falls short of confirming that the data prove the study’s veracity – as recently reported by the Science Detective. 

The appointment of Data Editors by more journals, and more non-specialist journals, is an important move in elevating the integrity of emerging research – one which Dryad is uniquely positioned to support.

With this post, we invite Data Editors, and journals considering adding Data Editors to their Boards, to consider the optimum workflows to support this work – and reach out to see how Dryad might help.

The need to do more with data

As we wrote last December, the open availability of research data is increasingly central to establishing credibility and impact for research.

Declining public trust in research and mounting pressure on research budgets are reshaping the research publication environment. And alongside the broader pressures on the research ecosystem, there is a more specific and acute challenge: the widespread inability of published findings to be independently reproduced.

We know the causes of the reproducibility crisis: data are unavailable, poorly documented, incomplete, or untrustworthy. In short, data-sharing policies and practices have not kept pace with what reproducible research actually requires. Inadequate and even fraudulent datasets are making their way into the scholarly record. 

Open access to underlying data contributes to transparency and reproducibility. The Dryad curation and data publishing process is unique in also ensuring data are findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). But, as demonstrated by the Science Detective and other such investigations, additional steps are needed to effectively connect data with reported conclusions. Researchers must do more to help peer reviewers and readers verify and reproduce their results. We need infrastructure and expertise that can meet researchers where they are – and guide them toward something better. The emergence of a dedicated Data Editor role reflects a growing recognition of exactly this need.

A Data Editor’s function is to ensure the reproducibility, integrity, and originality of research data submitted alongside a manuscript. In practice, this means reviewing raw data and code for completeness and formatting, verifying metadata, and ensuring that the data supports the paper’s conclusions.

A successful case study

A 2023 article in Science Editor by Dr. August Muench, Data Editor for the American Astronomical Society (AAS) journals, illustrates what data editing can look like when done well. 

AAS Data Editors review more than 85% of submitted manuscripts, providing authors with structured feedback alongside the first peer review. They curate machine-readable tables, standardize metadata, guide authors through the deposit of datasets into persistent repositories, and support the creation of interactive figures and animated visualizations. They also manage the complex web connecting journal articles to data archives. They are expert partners to authors navigating an increasingly demanding data landscape.

As a result, software citation rates have increased; compliance with data and figure requirements has improved; and their published corpus has become richer, more reproducible, and of greater use to readers.

This model represents a template that more disciplines and journals are actively considering. However, Dr Muench also identifies challenges that are widely shared, such as scaling curation capacity and author support, and ensuring the quality and utility of metadata. 

How can Dryad help?

Dryad was founded in 2007 to make the data underlying published research openly available, well-curated, and preserved for the long term. Since then, we have built and refined our technical infrastructure, our integrations with journal workflow systems and preprint servers, our curation practices, and the partnership models that make open data publishing work across a remarkable range of disciplines, journals, and institutional contexts.

As part of our commitment to research integrity, Dryad provided Markus Englund, Science Detective, with unrestricted access to our corpus so that his software could identify potential instances of copy and pasting in tabular data. This has allowed us to engage authors and affected journals in pursuing resolution where possible. 

We work directly with authors to ensure that every dataset we publish meets the FAIR principles. And, importantly, we support journals at every stage of their data availability journey, from those that are just starting out to those with decades of established practice. Our workflows are adaptable, enabling data deposits at any stage of the editorial lifecycle and providing flexible peer review options.

We also understand that no two journals are alike. A highly-specialized society journal has different requirements than a broad-scope outlet, as documented by IOP Publishing, in this report on data sharing practices across different disciplines. 

For nearly two decades Dryad has developed and applied expertise in author support and curation, and are ready to complement the domain expertise that Data Editors uniquely bring to the scholarly publishing system.

Let’s design something together

We want to work with journals and publishers that are establishing or expanding Data Editor roles. What do you need from a skilled data publishing partner? How can our workflows and tools integrate with editorial processes? Let’s co-design solutions that fit the realities of data editing work.

If you are a Data Editor, a journal manager, an editor-in-chief, editorial board member, or a journal leader thinking about the importance of data editing and review, we’d be very keen to connect. Reach out to us at hello@datadryad.org to talk.