Our working relationship with Dryad

The Journ­al of Evol­u­tion­ary Bio­logy (JEB), owned by the European Soci­ety of Evol­u­tion­ary Bio­logy (ESEB), has a mod­ern Open Data policy, man­dat­ing that all raw data asso­ci­ated with manu­scripts pub­lished in the journ­al are depos­ited in an appro­pri­ate pub­lic repos­it­ory. To ensure that no fin­an­cial bar­ri­er exists to meet­ing the require­ments of our policy, JEB has partnered with Dry­ad for many years. For any authors using Dry­ad, JEB has met the costs of data depos­ition. In exchange for these fees, Dry­ad is provid­ing an excel­lent data cur­a­tion ser­vice, an extremely user-friendly inter­face and a highly respons­ive cus­tom­er ser­vice. We are very grate­ful to Dry­ad for the years of part­ner­ship but, after care­ful delib­er­a­tion, we have decided not to renew our mem­ber­ship. For all manu­scripts sub­mit­ted to JEB from 15th Decem­ber onwards, JEB will no longer meet the costs of depos­ition in Dry­ad for data asso­ci­ated with these papers.

Our decision has been driv­en by shifts in both the bene­fits and the costs of our asso­ci­ation with Dry­ad. Our Open Data policy is designed to ensure that all data asso­ci­ated with JEB manu­scripts is as access­ible and reusable as pos­sible. As such, the biggest advant­age to JEB of part­ner­ing with Dry­ad had ori­gin­ally been the excel­lent cur­a­tion ser­vices they provide. How­ever, since May 2022, JEB has a ded­ic­ated Data Edit­or who already provides this cur­a­tion and does so regard­less of the repos­it­ory used. On the flip­side, Dry­ad have their own costs to meet, and their evolving fin­an­cial mod­el has led to increas­ing fees that, while jus­ti­fied for the level of ser­vice they provide, are no longer in line with our purposes. 

While our authors are obvi­ously still wel­come to use Dry­ad at their own expense, we recom­mend explor­ing the free altern­at­ives avail­able, such as the all-pur­pose repos­it­or­ies Zen­odo and Fig­share that exist along­side spe­cial­ist data­bases such as Gen­bank, the SRA etc. In com­bin­a­tion with our rig­or­ous data edit­ing policies, their use will allow JEB to provide both the required access­ib­il­ity and qual­ity of data archives without the addi­tion­al cost to the soci­ety of part­ner­ing with any one repository.

Our open data policy itself remains unchanged and our guide to repro­du­cible archiv­ing of data and code can be found here.

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