Our Mission

The Dryad Digital Repository is a curated resource that makes research data discoverable, freely reusable, and citable. Dryad provides a general-purpose home for a wide diversity of data types.

Dryad originated from an initiative among a group of leading journals and scientific societies to adopt a joint data archiving policy (JDAP) for their publications, and the recognition that open, easy-to-use, not-for-profit, community-governed data infrastructure was needed to support such a policy. These remain our guiding principles.

Dryad’s vision is to promote a world where research data is openly available, integrated with the scholarly literature, and routinely re-used to create knowledge.

Our mission is to provide the infrastructure for, and promote the re-use of, data underlying the scholarly literature.

Key features

• Flexible about data format, while encouraging the use and further development of research community standards.
• Fits into the manuscript submission workflow of its partner journals, making data submission easy.
• Assigns Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to data so that researchers can gain professional credit through data citation.
• Promotes data visibility through usage and download metrics and by allowing content to be indexed, searched and retrieved.
• Promotes data quality by employing professional curators to ensure the validity of the files and descriptive information.
• Contents are free to download and re-use under a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license.
• Contents are preserved for the long term to guarantee access to contents indefinitely.
• Open source, standards-compliant technology.