There so much is new activity at Dryad! As we prepare to relaunch our platform later this summer, we’ve been hard at work on:
- Rolling out a new Institutional Membership plan with enhanced benefits
- Planning for an upcoming webinar
- Redesigning our logo!
A New Way to Partner with us: Institutional Memberships
Over the past few months you may have heard of or been involved in conversations about Dryad launching a new Institutional Membership – the ‘rumors’ are true and we are pleased to be rolling out this new program to institutions globally! During our first week, California State University – East Bay and Montana State University have officially joined the Dryad community! We are very excited to have these two institutions as members. And they’re excited to join as well:
“Dryad provides Cal State East Bay faculty and students with a tool that will not only preserve their research data but also make it available to the public at large. Because equity and access are core values of our university, we are excited to be one of the early adopters.”
— Jeffra Diane Bussmann, MLIS Associate Librarian
Our plan is to build a member-owned community of organizations who support data publishing, curation, and preservation on behalf of researchers. We need to band together to make this happen. We know that researchers depend on Dryad; even as more institutions build and promote local data repositories, the number of submissions to Dryad continues to grow year on year. Our goal is to make the Dryad community compatible with the efforts of all institutions, regardless of local data repository infrastructure.
(Our new Institutional Membership is the first step in this direction; towards the end of the year we will be launching a new Publisher Membership with enhanced integrations and customized reporting, but more on that in a few months).
For now, we are rolling out the Institutional Membership program. We encourage all research institutions to join now as we prepare to re-launch the Dryad platform. The ‘new’ Dryad will offer features for institutional members including campus single sign-on, bespoke reporting, local curation capabilities, and campus co-branding.
Our new model allows for flexibility in how we partner with research organizations.Through our curation, reporting, and integration systems, Dryad can either serve as your primary repository or supplement the services you currently offer.
Forthcoming Webinar
If you’d like to hear more about how your institution can be part of the Dryad community, please join our Institutional Member Webinar on March 27th!
At this webinar Dryad will be joined by our colleagues John Chodacki and Daniella Lowenberg from the California Digital Library (CDL) to discuss the MANY reasons to join the Dryad community as we showcase some of the new functionality and outline the benefits a Membership brings your institution.
Of course, one of the key questions everyone will want to know is – what will this cost? Dryad has crafted a tiered pricing structure based on an institution’s ability to pay. We don’t want any potential member to not be able to join because of the annual fee, so hopefully our plans will work for any potential institution (and if not, I would be happy to discuss directly with you).
Our New Look
As a capstone to these major changes, you may have noticed we have refreshed the Dryad logo! We think this new bright image conveys the spirit of connectivity that Dryad represents across our community. It also retains a thematic connection to our original design. After all, Dryad is still true to our roots (no logo-based pun intended); it is important to us that we never lose sight of Dryad’s core mission to support infrastructure that openly and freely shares and preserves research data for the long term.
If you’d like to JOIN TODAY or receive additional information regarding Dryad, please contact me at director@datadryad.org.
See you at the Institutional Member Webinar on March 27th.
