Q&A series with ECS OpenCon 2017 speakers
Meredith Morovati, executive director of Dryad
ECS will be hosting its first ever OpenCon event on October 1 in National Harbor, MD. OpenCon will be ECS’s first, large community event aimed at creating a culture of change in how research is designed, shared, discussed, and disseminated, with the ultimate goal of making scientific progress faster.
During ECS’s OpenCon, Meredith Morovati, executive director of Dryad, will give a talk on open data.
The following conversation is part of a series with speakers from the upcoming ECS OpenCon. Read the rest of the series.
ECS: How and why did Dryad get its start; and how has it grown since then?
Meredith Morovati: Editors from journals in the fields of evolution and life science—some of them competing journals—were becoming concerned that it was difficult to find data that supported the literature; the “policy” of asking an author to share data after the fact was a failure. In 2011, twelve of these editors came together to remedy this, and developed the Joint Data Archive Policy (JDAP). JDAP required, as a condition of publication, that data be archived in an appropriate public archive and stated that data are products of the scientific enterprise in their own right. These editors argued that data must be preserved and usable in the future. JDAP is now a model for requiring data as a condition of publishing an article.
The use of Dryad was not stipulated as part of this policy, but Dryad became the preferred solution due to its one-to-one relationship with data and scholarly literature. In addition, Dryad curates data to ensure high quality metadata and is committed to discoverability.
