The Dryad Repository has received a $2.18 million grant from the National Science Foundation.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
The repository, called Dryad, is designed to archive data that underlie published findings in evolutionary biology, ecology and related fields and allow scientists to access and build on each other’s findings.
The grant recipients are:
- National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent), a collaborative effort involving UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke and North Carolina State universities.
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Metadata Research Center in the School of Information and Library Science;
- North Carolina State University’s Digital Library Program;
- Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network Office at the University of New Mexico;
- Yale University’s TreeBASE database; and
The National Evolutionary Synthesis Center and the Metadata Research Center have been developing Dryad in coordination with a large group of Journals and Societies in evolutionary biology and ecology. With the new grant, the additional team members are contributing to the development of the repository. . . .
Currently, a tremendous amount of information underlying published research findings is lost, researchers say. The lack of data sharing and preservation makes it impossible for the data to be examined or re-used by future investigators.
Dryad addresses these shortcomings and allows scientists to validate published findings, explore new analysis methodologies, repurpose data for research questions unanticipated by the original authors, integrate data across studies and look for trends through statistical meta-analysis.
"The Dryad project seeks to enable scientists to generate new knowledge using existing data," said Kathleen Smith, Ph.D., principal investigator for the grant, a biology professor at Duke and director of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center. "The key to Dryad in our view is making data deposition a routine and easy part of the publication process."