The Dryad Digital Repository is a curated resource that makes the data
underlying scientific publications discoverable, freely reusable, and
citable. Dryad provides a general-purpose home for a wide diversity of
datatypes. Dryad is governed by a nonprofit membership organization.
Membership is open to any stakeholder organization, including but not
limited to journals, scientific societies, publishers, research
institutions, libraries, and funding organizations. Dryad originated from
an initiative among a group of leading journals and scientific societies in
evolutionary biology and ecology to adopt a joint data archiving policy
(JDAP) for their publications, and the recognition that easy-to-use,
sustainable, community-governed data infrastructure was needed to support
such a policy. In this briefing, I discuss how Dryad has evolved to meet
the needs of the broader research community, highlight challenges in the
data preservation landscape, and summarize the approaches that have been
adopted to identify and provide services that meet the needs of researchers.
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Professor and Director of e-Science Program, College of University
Libraries and Learning Sciences; Project Director, EPSCoR State Program;
Project Director, DataONE; Editor, ESA Data Papers; Associate Editor, Int.