Science family journals, a prominent group of scientific publications, have partnered with Dryad, a nonprofit data repository, to streamline the process of depositing data underlying new research. This partnership is aimed at facilitating the reuse of data and ensuring that the scientific community has access to the data required to verify, replicate, and reanalyze research findings.
According to Holden Thorp, the Editor-in-Chief of the Science family of journals, "addressing public access to data at scale is a critical challenge." The Science journals have already mandated that the data underlying published papers be made publicly available immediately. Science editors have noticed a rise in data deposition at public repositories in recent years.
However, data deposition presents more challenges where field-specific repositories do not exist. Partnering with Dryad, a generalist repository, will address this issue for Science journal authors and simplify the process overall.
The partnership with Dryad will integrate the platform with the Science family journal's submission process, allowing authors to deposit data directly from the submission site of any Science family journal. The datasets of accepted papers will undergo Dryad's curatorial process to ensure they are usable, and they will become public on the Dryad site, with an associated DOI and links to and from the published research article. Dryad also provides metrics that measure the number of times an individual data publication has been viewed, cited, and downloaded.
The Science journals will cover the costs of Dryad data publication for accepted papers to ensure that this service is widely available. By partnering with Dryad, the Science journals hope to improve the evaluation of research findings across the scientific enterprise and strengthen the reproducibility of work published in their journals.
The scientific community's response to Dryad's platform has highlighted benefits such as the ease of use of the platform and the value authors place on data curation by Dryad staff. This repository is particularly important for early-career researchers, who can receive credit for their datasets through Dryad citations and build their reputation for following transparent research practices by depositing in the repository.
The Science journals remain committed to engaging with both the research and repository communities to help ensure that data becomes more findable and reusable going forward. The open availability of data is critical to enabling the acceleration of discovery and translation of research into benefits for society.
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