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Archive for the ‘Governance’ Category

And Now, the Numbers . . .

Posted in Data curation, Featured data, Governance, Uncategorized on 2017/03/14| Leave a Comment »

As the new year begins, we take note of the increasing diversity of fields represented in data archived at Dryad and review the numbers for 2016.

Dryad Grows into a General Repository

We are excited to see Dryad’s role in the preservation of data expand into new areas and fields in 2016. Researchers submitted more data involving human subjects and data from social media. In addition, a quick look at our most popular data shows that two of the top five downloaded packages were from the fields of cardiology and science journalism. While Dryad’s origins are in the life sciences, it is increasingly being used as a general repository for data from a myriad of fields.

Let’s take a look at the numbers for 2016:

Increase in Number of Data Packages and Data Files

Our curators were busy! The total number of published data packages (sets of data files associated with a publication) at the end of the year was a whopping 15,325. Our curators meticulously archived 4,307 packages, a 10% increase from 2015. The size of data packages also continued to grow – from an average of 481MB to an average of 573MB, an increase of about 20%.summary of Dryad data packages 2016

At the end of 2016, we were closing in on 50,000 archived data files; by January of this year, we passed that mark.

In a future blog, we’ll talk about the integration of new journals into the Dryad submission process, new members, and new partnerships. For now, we’ll just note that there was a 22% increase in the number of journals that have data in Dryad linking back to the article.

New Fields

We’ve seen a significant uptick in human subjects data and social media data this year, which has prompted us to develop an FAQ on cleaning and de-identification of human subjects data for public access. As the idea of what data should be preserved continues to broaden, submissions of these kinds of data will only increase. We’ll keep you updated about this trend in future blogs.

Top Downloads

Let’s take a look at the most popular data published in 2016, in terms of downloads. Among the top 5 downloads includes data on plant genetics, the early history of ray-finned fishes, and, not surprisingly in this age, the effects of climate change on boreal forests.

Also of interest are data from an article in Science evaluating how people make use of Sci-Hub, an open source scholarly library. Our guest blog on these data by science journalist John Bohannon generated a lot of interest this year and was one of our most popular blog posts ever.

Another significant development in 2016 came from the medical sciences. A comparison of coronary diagnostic techniques marked Dryad’s first submission from one of the top five cardiology journals, JACC: Cardiovascular Interventions.

The fact that 2 of the 5 top downloads come from fields outside of life sciences clearly indicates that data in Dryad now cover a broad range of fields.

Top 5 Downloads of Data Archived in 2016

Article Dryad DOI Number of Downloads
Wagner MR et al. (2016) Host genotype and age shape the leaf and root microbiomes of a wild perennial plant. Nature Communications 7: 12151. http://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.g60r3 3123
Bohannon J et al. (2016) Who’s downloading pirated papers? Everyone.  Science 352(6285): 508-512. http://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.q447c 2969
D’Orangeville L et al. (2016) Northeastern North America as a potential refugium for boreal forests in a warming climate. Science 352(6292): 1452-1455. http://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.785cv 741
Johnson NP et al. (2016) Continuum of vasodilator stress from rest to contrast medium to adenosine hyperemia for fractional flow reserve assessment. JACC. Cardiovascular Interventions 9(8): 757-767. http://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.f76nv 453
Lu J et al. (2016) The oldest actinopterygian highlights the cryptic early history of the hyperdiverse ray-finned fishes. Current Biology 26(12): 1602–1608. http://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.t6j72 423

Overall, we’ve had a great year and are delighted to be seeing a broader range of data from an increasing number of journals and fields. Thanks to our Board of Directors, members, and of course our staff for providing their support to make 2016 a notable year for Dryad!

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New pricing structure with simplified terms and increased size limits

Posted in Funding, Governance, Policy on 2015/12/15| Leave a Comment »

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Over the last few years, we’ve learned a lot about what is needed to curate, preserve, and provide access to data for the long term, as well as to sustain an independent not-for-profit organization. We’ve also paid close attention to the needs and wants of our user community and members. To meet these needs, we are revising our pricing structure for the first time since it was introduced in 2013.

  • Submissions initiated after 4 January 2016 will have a base Data Publication Charge (DPC) of $120US.
  • Pricing is now the same for all journals – there will no longer be an additional surcharge for non-integrated publications.
  • We encourage individuals and small groups to purchase bundles of DPC vouchers in advance and in any quantity. Purchases over 25 DPCs will enjoy a discount.
  • As a further user benefit, we will be doubling the maximum package size before overage fees kick in (to 20GB) and simplifying and reducing the overage fees.
  • We will continue to waive DPCs for researchers from World Bank low-income and low-middle-income economies upon request.
  • Membership fees are not changing, but Dryad members will be entitled to receive larger discounts on DPCs.
  • As always, there are no fees to download or reuse data from Dryad.
  • Integrating Dryad’s system with partner journals remains a free service.

Dryad’s Board of Directors will continue to keep a close eye on the repository’s sustainability progress. We anticipate this price structure will remain stable for the foreseeable future and are always seeking opportunities for savings and efficiencies.

We are grateful to our community supporters and take seriously the responsibility to ensure the long-term availability of the research data entrusted to us.

Prepaid data submission vouchers can be purchased at current pricing levels ($80 apiece) through January 4th (and at the new price of $120 apiece after that), by contacting help@datadryad.org.

Payment plans are either subscription or usage-based. Organizations and individuals may also make advance purchases of any number of DPCs and are eligible for bulk discounts for purchases of 25 or more.

What exactly do your DPCs cover?

The following breakdown of expenses reflects projected costs in the near future, extrapolating from historic growth rates. Approximately half of costs are associated with Repository Management, including membership-based nonprofit governance, communications with Dryad’s many stakeholders, members and partners, and upkeep of software systems (Repository Maintenance). Another quarter of the costs are due to the curation and user support provided to each data package, part of Dryad’s unique service offering and commitment to quality.

Since Dryad is a virtual organization, Infrastructure & Facilities largely covers server costs, digital storage, and interoperability technologies such as Digital Object identifiers (DOIs). A small fraction goes to community outreach activities to help encourage data publication best practices and raise awareness of Dryad. Administrative Support covers essential functions such as accounting and contract review.

Finally, Research and Development is essential for building new features to support changing technology and user expectations. R&D expenses are included here, but would ordinarily be covered through special project grants and not considered an operating expense paid for through DPCs.

We expect that as efficiencies are put into place, volume increases, and further economies of scale are realized, the percentage of the DPC supporting Repository Management will decrease and other areas, most notably Curation, will increase.

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2015 Dryad Community Meeting: Taking a closer look at data

Posted in Governance, Meetings on 2015/03/29| 1 Comment »

We invite you to register for the 2015 Dryad Community Meeting, which will take place on May 27th from 8:30am-4:00pm in Washington, DC.  The theme of this year’s meeting is “Taking a Closer Look at Data”, featuring a keynote presentation from Brian Nosek of the Center for Open Science.

The Community Meeting brings together researchers, librarians, publishers, funders and other individuals and organizations with a stake in the preservation and availability of the scientific and medical data associated with the published literature.

The program includes:

  • Dryad101, an introduction to the Dryad Digital Repository, including an overview of recent and upcoming developments
  • A Community Perspectives Forum in which partner journals and member organizations have an opportunity to share their experiences with data publishing.
  • The annual Dryad Business Meeting during which stakeholders can have a say in the governance of the nonprofit organization.
  • An Emerging Issues panel discussion all about the concept of “data review”.  This is an opportunity to hear about the experiences of the community with various forms of data review and to consider whether and how data review may be more widely adopted by Dryad’s community in the future to improve the value of data for reuse.

Our keynote speaker, Dr. Brian Nosek is Professor, Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia and Director, Center for Open Science. The Center for Open Science is a nonprofit technology startup that aims to increase openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scientific research. He is also co-founder of the widely known Project Implicit.

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There is no cost for registration, but space is limited, so please register early to ensure availability.

For inquiries, please contact Meredith Morovati (mmorovati@datadryad.org), Executive Director.

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2014 Dryad-Dataverse Community Meeting (updated)

Posted in Governance, Meetings, Policy on 2014/03/20| 1 Comment »

BostonPanPlain2Updates: The originally scheduled keynote address from Phil Bourne will instead be a session on “The Future of Open Data – What to Expect from US Funders” with Jennie Larkin, Deputy Associate Director for Data Science at NIH and Peter McCartney, Program Director in the Division of Biological Infrastructure at NSF. Also, doors will open at 8:30 for a reception, at which light breakfast will be served.

We’re pleased to announce that our 2014 Community Meeting will be held on May 28 at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University.  This year’s meeting is being held jointly with the Dataverse Network Project, and the theme is Working Together on Data Discovery, Access and Reuse.

Many actors play a role in ensuring that research data is available for future knowledge discovery, including individual researchers, their institutions, publishers and funders. This joint community meeting will highlight existing solutions and emerging issues in the discovery, access and reuse of research data in the social and natural sciences.

Keynote speaker Dr. Phil Bourne is the first and newly appointed Associate Director for Data Science at the National Institutes of Health and a pioneer in furthering the free dissemination of science through new models of publishing. Prior to his NIH appointment, he was a Professor and Associate Vice Chancellor at the University of California San Diego.  He has over 300 papers and 5 books to his credit. Among his diverse contributions, he was the founding Editor-in-Chief of PLOS Computational Biology, has served as Associate Director of the RCSB Protein Data Bank, has launched four companies, most recently SciVee, and is a Past President of the International Society for Computational Biology. He is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the International Society for Computational Biology and the American Medical Informatics Association. Other honors he has received include the Benjamin Franklin Award in 2009 and the Jim Gray eScience Award in 2010.

The meeting will run from 8:30 9:00 am – 2:15 pm, including light breakfast and a catered lunch.  It will be followed by a Dryad Members Meeting, open to all attendees, from 2:30 – 3:30 pm.

There is no cost for registration, but space is limited. Onsite registration will be made available if space allows, and the proceedings will also be simulcast online.  Please see the meeting page for details.

This year’s Community Meeting has been scheduled for the convenience of those attending the Society for Scholarly Publishing Annual Meeting from May 28-30 in Boston.  SSP attendees may also wish to attend the session “The continuum from publishers to data repositories: models to support seamless scholarship”  May 29th from 10:45am-12:00pm.

For inquiries, please contact Laura Wendell (lwendell@datadryad.org) or Mercè Crosas (mcrosas@iq.harvard.edu).

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We had a busy week in Oxford this past May

Posted in Governance, Meetings on 2013/07/31| Leave a Comment »

We’re happy to announce that presentations are now available from Dryad’s Annual Membership Meeting, held at St. Anne’s College, Oxford this May.  Dryad personnel reported on the state of the repository and the organization’s sustainability and business strategy.  The meeting also included a very valuable “Emerging Issues Forum” that looked forward to new opportunities for the repository and its community of users. We heard from Marianne Bamkin on model journal policies, Jonathan Tedds on review of data associated with publications, Simon Hodson on funding for data archiving costs, Sarah Callaghan on recommendations for data citation policy, Martin Fenner on ways to track data usage and impact, Eefke Smit on the state of the art in repository certification, Susanna-Assunta Sansone on the relevance of the ISA and Biosharing initiatives, and Bill Michener on the opportunities provided by DataONE and other DataNets.

This was the first community meeting since Dryad incorporated as a nonprofit in July 2012, and it was an opportunity for the organization’s Members to exercise their role in governance.  By electronic votes, returning director Susanna-Assunta Sansone, as well as new members Charles Fox, Martin Fenner and Carol Tenopir were elected to the 2016 class of the Board of Directors and several minor amendments to the ByLaws were unanimously adopted.

The meeting capped several days of programming around data, publication and scholarly communication.  The week kicked off with an exciting one-day symposium on The Now and Future of Data Publishing, cosponsored by Jisc, BioSharing, DataONE, Dryad, STM and Wiley-Blackwell (presentations available on Slideshare). The next day, Dryad and ORCID co-organized a Symposium on Research Attribution in conjunction with ORCID’s Outreach Meeting and Codefest, and presentations from the symposium are available on the ORCID website.  The symposium featured keynote talks from Joanna McEntyre (Europe PubMedCentral) and David DeRoure (Oxford eResearch Centre); panel discussions with Liz Allen (Wellcome Trust), John Kaye (British Library), Neil Chue Hong (Software Sustainability Institute), Christine Borgman (UCLA), Trish Groves (BMJ) and Martin Fenner (PLOS); and a wrap-up discussion with Cameron Neylon (PLOS).

Many thanks to those of you who contributed as both organizers and participants, and a special thanks to our hosts at the Oxford eResearch Institute.   The next meeting will be in May 2013 in North America and will also be open to the community.  Please let us know if you have ideas for what you’d like to see in the next Emerging Issues forum.

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Submission fees to be introduced in September 2013

Posted in Data availability, Data curation, Funding, Governance, Meetings, New features, Uncategorized on 2013/04/29| 1 Comment »

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Dryad is a nonprofit organization fully committed to making scientific and medical research data permanently available to all researchers and educators free-of-charge without barriers to reuse.  For the past four years, we have engaged experts and consulted with our many stakeholders in order to develop a sustainability plan that will ensure Dryad’s content remains free to users indefinitely.  The resulting plan allows Dryad to recoup its operating costs in a way that recovers revenues fairly and in a scalable manner.  The plan includes revenue from submission fees, membership dues, grants and contributions.

A one-time submission fee will offset the actual costs of preserving data in Dryad.  The majority of costs are incurred at the time of submission when curators process new files, and long-term storage costs scale with each submission, so this transparent one-time charge ensures that resources scale with demand.  Dryad offers a variety of pricing plans for journals and other organizations such societies, funders and libraries to purchase discounted submission fees on behalf of their researchers.  For data packages not covered by a pricing plan, the researcher pays upon submission.  Waivers are provided to researchers from developing economies.  See Pricing Plans for a complete list of fees and payment options.  Submission fees will apply to all new submissions starting September 2013.

Membership dues will supplement submission fees, allowing Dryad to maintain its strong ties to the research community through its volunteer Board of Directors, Annual Membership Meetings, and  other outreach activities to researchers, educators and stakeholder organizations.  See Membership Information.

Grants will fund research, development and innovation.

Donations will support all of the above efforts.  In addition, Dryad will occasionally appeal to donors to fund special projects or specific needs, such as preservation of valuable legacy datasets and deposit waivers for researchers from developing economies.

We are grateful for all the input we have received into our sustainability plan, and look forward to your continued support in carrying out our nonprofit mission for many long years to come.

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Stakeholder governance

Posted in Governance, tagged on 2012/06/15| 1 Comment »

“The scientific, educational, and charitable mission of Dryad is to promote the availability of data underlying findings in the scientific literature for research and educational reuse. The vision of Dryad is a scholarly communication system in which learned societies, publishers, institutions of research and education, funding bodies and other stakeholders collaboratively sustain and promote the preservation and reuse of data underlying the scholarly literature.”

This Mission Statement is from Dryad’s new Bylaws, which were approved this month by a vote of its Interim Partners. Since its inception, Dryad been guided by the idea that an enduring community resource requires stakeholder governance, and the Bylaws set out the structure of the membership-based organization by which that will be achieved.

The new governance structure vests financial and legal responsibility with a Board of Directors elected by the Membership. Members may include journals, scientific societies, publishers, funding agencies, universities and any other organization that shares an interest in Dryad’s mission. The twelve Directors serve as individuals, not necessarily affiliated with a Member, and serve – on a voluntary basis – for renewable three-year terms.

A diverse and distinguished list of twenty candidates accepted the nomination to run for the charter Board of Directors in an election held this May. The following twelve individuals were elected to assume office on the 1st of July 2012, and serve terms varying from one to three years.

  • Theodora Bloom, Public Library of Science
  • Lee Dirks, Microsoft Research
  • Simon Hodson, JISC
  • Marcel Holyoak, University of California, Davis
  • Brian Lavoie, OCLC Research
  • William Michener, University of New Mexico
  • Allen J. Moore, University of Georgia
  • Susanna-Assunta Sansone, University of Oxford
  • Eefke Smit, International Association of STM Publishers
  • Todd Vision, Biology Dept., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  • Michael Whitlock, University of British Columbia

The first face-to-face Board Meeting will be held this July in Durham, North Carolina, and the first annual Members Meeting will be held in May 2013. More background on the history and current status of Dryad’s governance is available at http://wiki.datadryad.org/Governance.

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