Dryad Home > Depositing to Dryad

Depositing data to Dryad

Contents:

Why should I choose Dryad for my data?

Dryad aims to make data archiving as simple and as rewarding as possible:

Simple

Rewarding

Dryad: Data sharing makes our shoulders broader on Prezi

What should you deposit?

It is impossible to predict precisely which data will be most useful to researchers in the future. Dryad recommends depositing as much data as possible, in accordance with the following guidelines:

Recommendations for authors

Please provide a ReadMe file for each data package you deposit so that the data can be correctly interpreted. Multiple ReadMe files may be submitted if it is necessary to document each data file separately.

  1. Write your ReadMe file in a plain text file
  2. Introductory information should include:
    • for each filename, a short description of what data it includes
    • who collected the data and whom to contact with questions
  3. Describe:
    • column headings for any tabular data
    • the units of measurement used
    • what symbols are used to record missing data
    • any specialized formats or abbreviations used
    • any additional related data collected that was not included in the current data package
  4. Use standardized formats and follow scientific conventions in both your ReadMe file and in your data files:
    • Dates: Dryad suggests you follow the W3C/ISO 8601 date standard, which specifies the international standard notation of YYYYMMDD.
      EXAMPLES: 20090824 is 24 August 2009. Times can be appended as YYYYMMDDThhmmss; 3 seconds after 1:05 pm on March 18, 2002 is 20020318T130503. Punctuation can be added to improve readability: 2009-08-24 or 2002-03-18T13:05:03.
    • Taxonomic, geospatial, geologic names: Dryad recommends using terms from standardized taxonomies and vocabularies.
      EXAMPLE: Torellia vallonia (the scientific name for the acorn hairysnail; example from ITIS
      EXAMPLE: Yardley Village (inhabited place); example from TGN (Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names)

Suggestions for data management

While preparing your data, Dryad recommends you follow these guidelines:

Additional detail & examples of best practices for data management can be found here: Data archiving in ecology and evolution: best practices, MC Whitlock, (2010). Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 26 (2), p. 61-65. doi:10.1016/j.tree.2010.11.006 Some Simple Guidelines for Effective Data Management, Borer ET, Seabloom EW, Jones MB, Schildhauer M (2009). Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America 90(2), 205-214. doi:10.1890/0012-9623-90.2.205.

Submission process

To deposit data, simply click on the Submit Data Now button above and follow the directions. After logging in, you will be asked to describe your publication. If your publication appears in a journal that has integrated its manuscript processing system with Dryad, we will import the manuscript details for you. Once the publication has been described, you can upload your data files, including a title and short description with each file.

A brief video demonstrates the data deposit process from start to finish.

If you have any difficulty depositing data, or if you have particularly large files to deposit (more than 100MB), please contact us by sending email to help@datadryad.org. Note that submissions are limited in size. The entire package of data files submitted for an article must be less than 10GB. If you need to store content larger than this, please contact help@datadryad.org for assistance.

Questions and comments about Dryad may be directed to help@datadryad.org.

How does the Dryad repository help me prepare a data management plan?

Data deposited in Dryad is publicly available with no legal restrictions on re-use, permanently preserved, and uniquely identified. Individuals and project teams are encouraged to identify Dryad as the destination repository for published data from their research.

Data deposited in Dryad can help researchers meet these policies and expectations:

Summaries of funding agencies' data policies can be found here:

Resources on data management and sharing:

Why use CC0?

All data submitted to Dryad is released to the public domain under Creative Commons Zero (CC0), which reduces legal and technical impediments to the reuse of data by waiving copyright and related rights to the extent permitted by law. In most cases, CC0 does not actually affect the legal status of your data, since facts in and of themselves are not eligible for copyright in most countries (e.g. see this commentary from Bitlaw regarding U.S. copyright law).

CC0 does not exempt those who reuse the data from following community norms for scholarly communication, in particular from citation of the original data authors. On the contrary, by removing unenforcable legal barriers, CC0 facilitates the discovery, re-use, and citation of that data.

"Community norms can be a much more effective way of encouraging positive behaviour, such as citation, than applying licenses. A well functioning community supports its members in their application of norms, whereas licences can only be enforced through court action and thus invite people to ignore them when they are confident that this is unlikely." (Panton Principles FAQ)

We follow the Science Commons recommendations regarding scientific data, which discourage researchers from presuming copyright and using licenses that include "attribution" and "share-alike" conditions. It is the position of the Dryad Consortium that a legal requirement for attribution is not the appropriate mechanism to enforce the community norm for attribution:

"when you federate a query from 50,000 databases (not now, perhaps, but definitely within the 70-year duration of copyright!) will you be liable to a lawsuit if you don’t formally attribute all 50,000 owners?" (Science Commons Database Protocol FAQ)

While "share-alike" conditions create an unnecessary legal tangle:

""share-alike" licenses typically impose the condition that some or all derivative products be identically licensed. Such conditions have been known to create significant "license compatibility" problems under existing license schemes that employ them. In the context of data, license compatibility problems will likely create significant barriers for data integration and reuse for both providers and users of data." (Science Commons Database Protocol FAQ)

Thus,

"... given the potential for significantly negative unintended consequences of using copyright, the size of the public domain, and the power of norms inside science, we believe that copyright licenses and contractual restrictions are simply the wrong tool [for data], even if those licenses and contracts are used with the best of intentions." (Science Commons Database Protocol FAQ)

Furthermore, Dryad’s use of CC0 to make the terms of reuse explicit has some important advantages:

It is important to note that if you have data that, due to pre-existing agreements, cannot be released under the terms of CC0, please do not deposit that data to Dryad. Journals that require data archiving as a condition of publication can make exceptions for such special cases.

What is a Dryad DOI?

The data you deposit in Dryad are given a Digital Object Identifier, or DOI. A DOI is a permanent, unique, and secure identifier. It should be used whenever referring to data in Dryad.

Here are 3 important points about DOIs:

How should I format a Dryad DOI?

The DOI can be presented with or without the web prefix http://dx.doi.org.

Here are two ways to display the same DOI:

Copying and pasting the page URL is not a stable or permanent way to point to your data, as it does not contain the DOI and could change.

How do I refer to my Dryad data in my article?

The data files you deposit into Dryad are given a DOI. A DOI is a permanent, unique, and secure identifier. It should be used whenever referring to data in Dryad.

If your data have been deposited into Dryad before your article is published, be sure to include the Dryad DOI in the article itself. Providing the Dryad DOI will allow readers to easily find the underlying data, and facilitates a subsequent data citation. Citations that include Dryad DOIs can be easily and accurately tracked, thereby improving the discoverability and recognition of your data and your article.

See also Where is the appropriate place in my journal article to refer to my data package?

Where is the appropriate place in my journal article to refer to my data package?

Community norms and best practices for data citation are emerging. Many variations exist among scientific journals regarding the location of links to supporting data. Some journals have a dedicated Data Resources section of the article, some include data identifiers in the Methods, and others recommend placing complete data citations in the References.

If a journal does not yet have a standard practice for data links, authors should work with their journal editors to find the best location. Regardless of where in the article the data is referenced, it is important to always use the DOI format when referring others to your data, i.e.:

Data deposited in the Dryad repository: doi:10.5061/dryad.j1fd7

What is a data package?

The entire set of data files associated with one publication is called a data package and is assigned a DOI, and each individual data file within the data package is also given a component DOI. When your data deposit is approved by the Dryad Curator, the DOI for your data package is sent to you by email. Please use the data package DOI when referring to your data, unless you are specifically making reference to a particular component data file.

For example, the data package http://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.1888 contains two files, NicSolstatus.csv and NicSolPLML.tre. Clicking through on each of these files to view their details, we can see that each one has its own Dryad file identifier DOI (http://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.1888/1 and http://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.1888/2 respectively). These component file data identifiers can be used when the files need to be referenced individually, rather than the data package as a whole.

How can I see how often my data package is viewed and downloaded?

The Dryad repository records how many times your Dryad record has been viewed and your data files downloaded, and displays this information for every data package and its component data files. Check back from time to time to watch your statistics increase. (We’re filtering out hits from search-engine robots and other automated services, so these numbers do represent real human usage.) Examples of frequently downloaded data packages in Dryad:

O'Connell KE, Noor MAF (2010) Data from: Raw whole Drosophila genome sequence traces have contaminant sequences from bacterial symbionts. Dryad Digital Repository. doi:10.5061/dryad.8085

Zanne AE, Lopez-Gonzalez G, Coomes DA, Ilic J, Jansen S, Lewis SL, Miller RB, Swenson NG, Wiemann MC, Chave J (2009) Data from: Towards a worldwide wood economics spectrum. Dryad Digital Repository. doi:10.5061/dryad.234

How can I add my data package to a Data section on my CV?

You can add a Data Publications section to your CV to highlight that you have made your data widely accessible. A complete data citation includes the reference to the original article and a reference to the data in Dryad, and both are displayed in Dryad for each data package, e.g.:

Article:

Wu D, Wu M, Halpern A, Rusch DB, Yooseph S, Frazier M, Venter JC, Eisen JA (2011) Stalking the fourth domain in metagenomic data: searching for, discovering, and interpreting novel, deep branches in phylogenetic trees of phylogenetic marker genes. PLoS ONE 6(3): e18011. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0018011

Dryad data package:

Wu D, Wu M, Halpern A, Rusch DB, Yooseph S, Frazier M, Venter JC, Eisen JA (2011) Data from: Stalking the fourth domain in metagenomic data: searching for, discovering, and interpreting novel, deep branches in phylogenetic trees of phylogenetic marker genes. Dryad Digital Repository. doi:10.5061/dryad.8384

It is important to use the DOI format when referring others to your data, i.e.:

Data deposited in the Dryad repository: doi:10.5061/dryad.j1fd7

See also How do I cite data from Dryad?

How do I tell someone that they can view or download my data from Dryad?

Give anyone who requests your data the Dryad DOI for your data package, and tell them they can access the data files from Dryad. For example:

Researchers may view and download my data files from Dryad at http://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.8085

It is important to use the DOI format when referring others to your data, i.e.

Data deposited in the Dryad repository: http://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.8085

If my data files are embargoed, when will they be released?

When the article is published, Dryad staff will complete the bibliographic reference and update Dryad file embargoes. If the files were embargoed until publication, they will be released at this time. If the files were embargoed for one year from article publication, the embargo end date will be set and displayed on the Dryad record.

We are working to improve the efficiency of our process for discovering newly published articles with associated data in Dryad. The lag time for updating Dryad records is much shorter for integrated journals than for non-integrated journals, and you are welcome to contact the Dryad curator at curator@datadryad.org if you notice a record that needs to be updated.

How can I "share" my data using social media?

Every data package in Dryad can be easily shared using the links at the bottom of the yellow citation box for each data package.

You can share a link to the data package via:

How can I download a Dryad citation to citation management software?

Citations for every data package in Dryad can be easily downloaded using the links at the bottom of the yellow citation box for each data package.

You can download the data package citation in the following formats:

Last revised: 2011-11-14

My Account

Browse

Information