Research Guides: Research Data Management: Dryad Data Repository

Data Repository: Dryad

The University of Oregon Library is now an Institutional Member of the Dryad data repository, a platform that makes research data discoverable, freely reusable, and citable as encouraged by funders and publishers. Dryad provides a general-purpose home for a wide diversity of data types. Our institutional membership means that you can deposit datasets into Dryad at no cost. Dryad is one of many data repositories used to share research data.

Questions? Contact DataServices@uoregon.edu or schedule an appointment.

Why use Dryad?

Dryad can help make your data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) as encouraged by funders and journals.
Publish and get a DOI for your dataset.
Track usage and downloads of your datasets.
Dryad supports most data file types across disciplines.
Have the ability to deposit data and associated code, scripts, and software packages privately during the peer review period.

You should not use Dryad if:

Your data is too sensitive to share publicly.
You cannot agree to the CC0 license for the datasets.
Your dataset publication is larger than 300GB (for datasets larger than 300GB, contact help@datadryad.org or DataServices@uoregon.edu)
If you need to share articles or other text documents, use Scholars’ Bank.

How is Dryad different from Scholars’ Bank?

Scholars' Bank and Dryad are complementary resources for the University of Oregon's faculty, staff, and students. Scholars' Bank is our institutional repository for preprints, documents, white papers, and other types of publications; it is not optimized for research data. Dryad is especially useful when it is integrated into a journal’s publishing platform. There is a limit in size and all data in Dryad must be released under Creative Commons Zero (CC0) waiver.

Dryad is not the only data repository, and it may not be the best solution for all of our researchers. If there is a disciplinary repository, we always recommend that you use that for greater visibility and impact. There may also be considerations depending on if you are grant funded, and/or if you are working with a publisher. Choosing a repository solution currently is not a one-size-fits-all. Your funder, publisher, or scholarly association may also maintain a list of recommended repositories. Please contact DataServices@uoregon.edu or schedule an appointment if you would like assistance identifying the best repository for your work.

Learn more about the Dryad data submission process.

Thanks to NC State University Libraries for letting us borrow from their helpful Dryad LibGuide.

Go to Dryad website. Click the Login button in the upper-right corner of the screen.
Click the Login or create your ORCID iD button.
Enter your ORCID iD or Email address and your ORCID password and click the Sign into ORCID button. If you do not have an ORCID iD, you can click the Register now link to sign up (see this guide for more information). Click the Authorize button to connect your ORCID iD to your Dryad account. In the future, you will be able to login into Dryad using only your ORCID iD and password.
Choose the University of Oregon from the drop-down menu under the Your Institution may be a member of Dryad heading. Click the Login to verify button.
Log in with your UO ID and Password. Click the Accept button to connect your Dryad account with UO’s institutional membership. You will not need to perform this login in the future.
You are officially logged into UO's Dryad membership! You can click on the Start New Dataset to begin submitting your dataset.

When you are ready to submit your data with Dryad, start by reviewing Dryad’s data submission best practices guide on how to organize and document your data to support re-use and discovery.

Log into Dryad using the instructions above.
Select "Start New Dataset" to begin the submission process for your dataset.
Choose whether or your dataset is related to a manuscript or published article by choosing one of the following radio buttons:

a manuscript in progress, or

By choosing "a manuscript in process," you can enter the Journal Name and Manuscript Number for your manuscript. If the journal you have submitted your manuscript with works with Dryad, click the Import Manuscript Metadata button to download the metadata from the journal.

a published article

By choosing "a published article," you can enter the Journal Name and DOI for your article and then click the Import Article Metadata button to download metadata about the article form ORCID and CrossRef.

Other or not applicable

By choosing "other or not applicable," you can simply start by entering information about your dataset. Basic Information heading, your First Name, Last Name, Institutional Affiliation and Author Email will already be filled in based on your ORCID iD.

Add any Additional Authors using the Add Author button.
Then add an Abstract for the dataset.
Click on the arrow on the left hand side of the screen to open the Data Description heading.
Enter the following metadata elements:

Keywords: Enter keywords that describe your data. Use a comma to separate each word or phrase. You can also enter important terms from any standards, controlled vocabularies, or ontologies that you specified in your Data Management Plan.
Methods: Enter a description of the methods used to collect and process your dataset. You may want to use descriptions from your Data Management Plan here as well.
Usage Notes: Enter the information someone would need to know in order to use your dataset. Be sure to include any necessary software and be sure to note the names of files containing codebooks or ReadMe files that will be necessary to understand the data. Be sure to include those files along with the dataset you upload.
Funding: Enter one or more funding agencies as well as any award numbers for each agency.
Related Works: Enter one or more related works to the dataset. From the drop-down Relationship menu, choose the relationship between the dataset and related work and, whenever possible, include identifier to the related work. From ID Type drop-down menu, choose the type of identifier and then enter the identifier.

Click the Proceed to Upload button.
On the next page you can upload data files, software and supplemental information either from your computer or by providing a URL for where the files are located on an external server like Box, Dropbox, or Amazon.
Once you have chosen all the files you would like to upload they will appear in a table at the bottom of the screen. Check the "I confirm that no Personal Health Information or Sensitive Data are being uploaded with this submission." checkbox and click the Upload pending files button.
Once the file(s) are uploaded, any tabular data will be checked using the Frictionless tool from Frictionless Data. The checks will validate the tabular data against the Frictionless Framework validation guide. The check will alert you to any data errors such as blank cells, missing headers, or incorrectly formatted data. Click the Proceed to Review button. If there are any required elements missing from your submission, a big red box will appear at the top of the screen to let you know what you must add in order to submit your dataset.
If any of the uploaded tabular data has issues, click on the View X Issues link to the file name in the Tabular Data Check column of the data files table. To review the issues. Once the issues have be corrected in the original file, click Remove in the Action column to delete the file with issues and Re-upload the corrected file using the Choose Files or Enter URLs button above.
Once all of your tabular data files have been passed the data check and all of your software and supplemental files have been uploaded via Zenodo, click the Proceed to Review button. Review the following elements before submitting the dataset for review:

Review Description: In addition to reviewing the description of the dataset that you have provided this is also where you will get the DOI that has been assigned to your dataset and what the citation for your dataset looks like. Be sure it includes all of the necessary information.
Review Data Files: In addition to the files containing your data, software and supplemental information, be sure that any files that are required for understanding and working with your data are also included.
Enable Private for Peer Review: Check the box next to "Keep my dataset private while my related article is in peer review" if your Data Management Plan included an embargo on making the data public during your article’s peer review. The default embargo is for six months and the dataset will not go through curation until the embargo ends.
License: Dryad only accepts datasets under a CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication license. If you cannot agree to this license, do not submit your dataset.
Agree to Terms: Check the boxes next to the terms. Be sure to review Dryad's Terms of Service.
Payment: There are no fees for uploading a dataset as part of University of Oregon’s Institutional Dryad Membership.

Click the Submit button.
Once your dataset is submitted and any embargoes are lifted, your dataset will go to curation by Dryad. During this time it is important not to edit your dataset as that will remove your dataset from the curation queue and make it appear as though it is not ready for curation.
You can begin to upload files or fill out the dataset metadata without submitting the data. The next time you login to Dryad, click on the My DataSets link in the left hand menu and you will be able to see, edit, or delete any of your datasets that have not been submitted to Dryad.