PLOS Genetics partners with Dryad

PLOS Genetics is pleased to announce its new partnership with Dryad, an Open Access repository for data underlying peer-reviewed articles. Following PLOS Biology’s integration with Dryad last year (detailed by Theo Bloom in her piece on dealing with data), PLOS Genetics authors can now take advantage of a fully integrated Dryad submission process, making their data discoverable, freely reusable, and citable.

PLOS’s ideal is that all data underpinning articles published in the journals should be made immediately available without restrictions upon publication. We are confident that this process will be made easier for our authors by giving them the option of deposition to Dryad upon manuscript submission. We hope that this new partnership will be useful as we work towards improving data access at PLOS, as discussed by John Chodacki earlier this year. The question of obtaining data used in research articles was also recently highlighted by Roli Roberts in his post, “Dude, Where’s My Data?”.

Dryad provides a multi-purpose and multi-disciplinary solution to data accessibility, and can be used by all authors submitting to PLOS Genetics, especially where no field-specific database exists. Through Dryad, data is assigned unique identifiers (DOIs) and is free to download upon publication of the article. Reviewers and editors will also be able to access the data during the peer review process. Once their article is published, authors can track citations of any data they have deposited in Dryad through the DOI, and it will be curated and stored with no inconvenience to them.

Please note that Dryad introduced a Data Publication Charge on 1st September 2013. For authors selecting the service, this fee will be charged by Dryad to the author if/when the related manuscript is accepted for publication, so there is no charge while manuscripts are under review.

We are looking forward to working with Dryad and improving the way we provide access to data in the articles we publish, in keeping with PLOS’s commitment to make research more open and accessible to all.