Dryad welcomes new board members

Today we celebrate our Board of Directors, and introduce three new members whose expertise and wide-ranging skills will help advance Dryad’s mission to provide free and easy access to data.

Dryad’s 12-member BOD supports and promotes our mission to make the data underlying scientific publications discoverable, freely reusable, and citable. The Board is comprised of diverse stakeholders, representing publishing, research, policy development, data networks, private funding, and scholarly organizations. BOD members are nominated by Dryad members and are elected or re-elected each year. They do not represent the organizations to which they belong; rather, they act as individuals in their involvement in the strategic planning and fiscal oversight of the company.

Who are the new members for 2017?

Adding to our esteemed Board of Directors this summer, we introduce our newest members:

Brian Hole (Class of 2020) will serve as treasurer of the Board. He is the CEO of Ubiquity Press, an open access publisher that focuses on alternative research outputs such as data, software, hardware, and bioresources. Previously, he managed the DryadUK project at the British Library, which focused on establishing a sustainable business model and publisher integrations, and also on building cost models for digital preservation. Brian brings a valued data-centric research background and detailed knowledge of open access publishing to Dryad this year.

 Fiona Murphy (Class of 2020) will serve as secretary of the Board. She is an independent research data and publishing consultant for institutions, societies, and commercial publishing companies and an Associate Fellow at the University of Reading. Fiona has written and presented widely on data publishing, open data, and open science. She has been involved in several research projects including PREPARDE, Data2Paper, and the Scholarly Commons Working Group. As an active member and sometime Co-Chair for several Research Data Alliance Groups focusing on data publishing policies, workflows, and accreditation systems, Fiona has organized several data-related events and sessions at scientific meetings.

Carly Strasser (Class of 2020) is a Program Officer at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and is especially interested in open science and scholarly communication. She works in the Data-Driven Discovery Initiative, which is focused on promoting both the researchers and the practices required for high impact data-driven research. Previously, Carly was a Research Data Specialist at the California Digital Library where she was involved in development and implementation of many of the University of California Curation Center’s services, and worked to promote data sharing and good data management practices. Carly’s prior experience as a researcher in marine science and mathematical ecology has informed her work of ushering in the new era of open, transparent, and collaborative science.

We wish to thank our current and past members for bringing their expertise and passion to help advance Dryad’s mission and we look forward to their contributions and to another exciting year of open data.