One of the most rewarding things about working for Dryad is collaborating with talented and passionate professionals from across the globe who are dedicated to increasing the availably of open data. This summer, two new people were officially elected to serve on Dryad’s Board of Directors and we are excited to have them our governance team.

Jennifer Lin, Director of Product Management at Crossref, comes to us with lots of experience in product development and management, community outreach, scholarly communications, and more. Based in California, USA, Jennifer was instrumental in helping Dryad integrate our data submission system with PLOS journals during her tenure there. She is a data sharing evangelist, and passionate about tools for making data reusable and discoverable. We are thrilled to have her direct her energy and enthusiasm Dryad’s way.

Johan Nilsson is also new to the Dryad board and comes from the Oikos Editorial Office, a society-owned publishing foundation based at Lund University, Sweden. Johan’s past work has been as a research scientist in evolutionary ecology. He has a strong interest in scientific communication and social media engagement and focuses particularly on how the benefits of open science (and open data in particular) can be better expressed to researchers. We value his expertise and perspective into how Dryad can best serve its users.

We would be remiss if we didn’t also publicly welcome Ingrid Dillo, who was appointed to the board early in 2016. Ingrid is deputy director at DANS (Data Archiving and Networked Services). She holds a PhD in history and has a long record of policy development at DANS, the National Library of the Netherlands and Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. She is especially interested in research data management and the certification of trustworthy digital repositories. We are already relying on Ingrid’s expertise and learning from her work with groups like the Research Data Alliance.

Candidates to Dryad’s 12 member Board of Directors are nominated by Member organizations, and four of the Directors are elected or re-elected every year. Once on the Board, Directors serve as individuals rather than organizational representatives. The 12-member rotating Board aims for both diversity of perspective and depth of expertise. We are delighted to have achieved both with our new Directors. We welcome them onboard and wish to extend a heartfelt thanks to Directors past, present, and future for their contributions and dedication to Dryad’s mission.

Dryad is seeking an energetic and enthusiastic Executive Director, ideally with experience in scientific or biomedical research, librarianship, or publishing, to oversee development and operation of the organisation during a period of rapid growth and transformation. The role reports to the Board of Directors. Externally, the postholder will be responsible for building relationships with stakeholders, customers and users of the Dryad Digital Repository. Internally, key responsibilities include organisational leadership and ensuring Dryad meets its objectives through sound financial management and oversight of day-to-day operations, with the support of a small but growing staff.  Review of applications will begin by September 1, 2014 and continue until the position is filled. For details please see the full position description and for inquiries please contact director@datadryad.org.

Photo by David Iliff; license: CC-BY-SA 3.0

Dryad invites current members, prospective members, and other interested parties to attend the Annual Membership Meeting in Oxford, UK on the 24th of May.  This is the first open meeting of the newly incorporated organization and will be the last membership meeting before the introduction of deposit fees in September.  Attendees will learn about recent developments, get a preview of upcoming features, have a say in the governance of the organization, and weigh in on topics of relevance to the future of Dryad, its members and partner journals.  Speakers scheduled to present emerging issues include:

• Marianne Bamkin of JoRD – Model journal policies and implementation
• Jonathan Tedds  of PREPARDE – Review of data associated with publications
• Simon Hodson of JISC – The use of grant funds for data archiving costs
• Sarah Callaghan of the CODATA-ICSTI Task Group on Data Citation – Data citation principles
• Martin Fenner of PLOS ALM – Tracking data usage and impact
• Eefke Smit of STM – The how and why of repository certification
• Susanna Assunta-Sansone of ISA and BioSharing – Helping researchers to collect, curate, analyse, share and publish data.
• Bill Michener of DataONE – Relevance of the DataNet program to Dryad

The Membership Meeting will cap off a series of exciting events spotlighting trends in scholarly communication and research data:

On Friday, the Obama administration made a long-awaited announcement regarding public access to the results of federally funded research in the United States.

There has been considerable attention given to the implications for research publications (a concise analysis here).  Less discussed so far — but just as far reaching — the new policy also has quite a lot to say about research data, a topic on which the White House solicited, and received, an earful of input just over a year ago.

What does the directive actually require?  All federal government agencies with at least $100M in R&D expenditures must develop, in the next six month, policies for digital data arising from non-classified research that address a host of objectives, including:

• to “maximize access, by the general public and without charge, to digitally formatted scientific data created with federal funds” while recognizing that there are cases in which preservation and access may not be desirable or feasible.
• to promote greater use of data management plans for both intramural and extramural grants and contracts, including review of such plans and mechanisms for ensuring compliance
• to allow inclusion of appropriate costs for data management and access in grants
• to promote the deposit of data in publicly accessible databases
• to address issues of attribution to scientific data sets
• to support training in data management and stewardship
• to “outline options for developing and sustaining repositories for scientific data in digital formats, taking into account the efforts of public and private sector entities”

Interestingly, the directive is silent on the issue of embargo periods for research data, neither explicitly allowing or disallowing them.

In the words of White House Science Advisor John Holdren

…the memorandum requires that agencies start to address the need to improve upon the management and sharing of scientific data produced with Federal funding. Strengthening these policies will promote entrepreneurship and jobs growth in addition to driving scientific progress. Access to pre-existing data sets can accelerate growth by allowing companies to focus resources and efforts on understanding and fully exploiting discoveries instead of repeating basic, pre-competitive work already documented elsewhere.

The breadth of research impacted by this directive is notable.  Based on the White House’s proposed 2013 budget, the covered agencies would spend more then $60 billion on R&D.  A partial list includes:

• The National Institutes of Health (NIH)
• The National Science Foundation (NSF)
• The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
• The Department of Energy (DOE)
• The Department of Agriculture (USDA)
• The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
• The National Institutes for Standards and Technology (NIST)
• The Department of the Interior (which includes the Geological Survey)
• The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
• and even the Smithsonian Institution

We applaud OSTP for moving to dramatically improve the availability of research data collected in the public interest with federal funds.

You can read the full memo here: the data policies are covered in Section 4.

We are experimenting with a nimble new format for our newsletter, in which each item consists of an individual blog post.  All the news items are also available in one PDF document if you’d prefer.

1. Stakeholder governance.  “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…
2. Sustainability planning.  Another important milestone was reached when the organization officially adopted a cost recovery plan to ensure Dryad’s sustainability.  The plan was the result of several years of deliberation among Dryad’s Interim Partners, experts in sustainability, and many prospective Member organizations…
3. Summer 2011 Interim Board meeting. The governance and cost recovery plan emerged from a consultation process that culminated in a meeting of the Dryad Interim Board in Vancouver, Canada in July 2011. In addition to the governance and sustainability plans, participants also made progress on a number of important policy issues. Several of these bear on what content Dryad will accept…
4. New funding from the US National Science Foundation. Earlier this year, the NSF, through its Advances in Biological Informatics program, announced a new award of $2.4M over four years to enable Dryad to scale up its technical infrastructure to support the rapidly expanding user base of journals and researchers, ensure that the repository is meeting the needs of that user base…
5. New integrated journals.  In recent months, more journals have implemented submission integration with Dryad to make data archiving easier for authors.  Technically, the process entails setting up semi-automated communications between Dryad and the manuscript submission system of the journal.  Currently 24 journals have implemented submission integration…
6. New features. A number of enhancements to Dryad have been made in recent months, including these three that were in high demand from users…

If you do not yet receive our newsletters by email and would like to, please sign up for our low traffic Dryad-announcements mailing list.

What matters to you when looking for research data in a repository? UK based Digital Curation Centre is looking for Dryad users to complete a 10 minute questionnaire on this. Results will contribute to an assessment framework for Dryad, and the questionnaire includes entry to a competition for $80/ £50 Amazon tokens. DCC are carrying this out as part of the Dryad UK project, which also involves the British Library and Oxford University’s Image Bioinformatics Lab.

A new study in PLoS ONE by Heather Piwowar, a postdoctoral associate affiliated with DataONE, Dryad, and NESCent, reveals interesting trends in the archiving of data underlying published microarray results.  From the press release:

By querying the full text of the scientific literature through websites like Google Scholar and PubMed Central, Piwowar identified eleven thousand studies that collected a particular type of data about cellular activity, called gene expression microarray data. Only 45% of recent gene expression studies were found to have deposited their data in the public databases developed for this purpose. The rate of data publication has increased only slightly from 2007 to 2009. Data is shared least often from studies on cancer and human subjects: cancer studies make their data available for wide reuse half as often as similar studies outside cancer.

“It was disheartening to discover that studies on cancer and human subjects were least likely to make their data available. These data are surely some of the most valuable for reuse, to confirm, refute, inform and advance bench-to-bedside translational research,” Piwowar said.

“We want as much scientific progress as we can get from our tax and charity dollars. This requires increased access to data resources. Data can be shared while maintaining patient privacy,” Piwowar added, noting that patient re-identification is rarely an issue for gene expression microarray studies.

Reference:  Piwowar, H. (2011). “Who shares? Who doesn’t? Factors associated with openly archiving raw research data.” PLoS ONE 6(7): e18657. doi:18610.11371/journal.pone.0018657

“In the spirit of the topic”, the data behind the study are publicly available in Dryad at doi:10.5061/dryad.mf1sd