Dryad's mission is to preserve and share all digital datasets that underly published articles. Thus, the repository does not provide highly specialized tools for a particular group of organisms or a particular kind of data. Dryad works to exchange data with more specialized repositories and databases, particularly those required by journals for publication of particular kinds of data (e.g. Genbank, Treebase).
A data repository provides benefits both to data submitters and to the larger scientific community. Data are protected against loss, and the metadata provided helps to make the data intelligible. The data can also be used to answer questions unanticipated at the time of the original study. Research suggests that open access to publications increases citation, and open access to data simply makes it easier for others to use the results of your publication. Future researchers can examine the effect of new analysis techniques. They can also combine data from different studies to examine trends and make broader generalizations.
You do not give up any rights to your data. You may continue to use the data as if it had not been deposited, as well as publish your data on other sites.
Once data is published, anyone may view the data, analyze it, and cite it. There is little difference between publishing data and publishing articles. Yes, it is possible that someone will analyze your data in a way you hadn't expected. But they must still cite you as the creator of the original data.
Currently, data sets must be emailed to the Dryad administrators at submit@datadryad.org. We are developing better tools for data submission.
Dryad will accept data in any format. However, technologies change, and not all data formats are equally easy to preserve. See the Dryad Data Collection Policy for information about Dryad's policies for specific types of data.
When you submit a dataset, it will be associated with a "primary" article. If the article describes the data sufficiently, no other documentation is required. If additional information would be required for another researcher to make use of the data (e.g., description of the column headings in a spreadsheet, or detailed documentation of a piece of software), this documentation should be made available in a file called README, submitted at the same time as the dataset.
Once we have created a sufficiently simple submission process, all authors submitting articles to our partner journals will be asked to submit datasets to the repository. In addition, datasets of particular historical, educational and scientific significance are being solicited for inclusion in the repository. Please see our list of featured datasets.
We are developing methods for citation information to be displayed along with other basic information about each dataset. Until this is fully developed, the Dryad team is happy to provide basic statistics on how often your data has been accessed from the repository. Please email us at admin@datadryad.org.
At this point, we are only accepting datasets associated with publications. In the future we may provide a method for data to be preserved while a manuscript is in preparation. Please see the Dryad Data Collection Policy for details.
In most cases, applying a license would not change the legal status of your data. According to legal experts, factual information, including most data in Dryad, is not eligible for copyright protection. While it is possible to apply copyright protections to the arrangement of a dataset (e.g., a database schema), the data itself cannot be protected under copyright law. (See commentary from the Science Commons arm of Creative Commons, as well as commentary from Bitlaw.)
Some types of information submitted to Dryad are eligible for copyright protection. These include computer programs, images, and textual descriptions that accompany data sets. In these cases, we encourage the use of the Creative Commons Attribution license.