Dryad FAQ

1. Organize: Create clear and concise folder structures with descriptive filenames.
2. Format and clean: Standardize data formats, remove duplicates, and handle missing values.
3. Provide documentation: Include a README file describing the dataset, variables, and any processing steps.
4. Ensure legal and ethical compliance: Obtain necessary permissions and licenses for sharing sensitive data.
5. Create a data package: Compress files into a single ZIP or TAR file for submission.
6. Check metadata: Ensure metadata completeness and accuracy to enhance data discoverability and understanding.
7. Test your package: Verify that the data can be easily accessed and understood by others before submitting it to Dryad.

• Dryad is able to ingest data for all disciplines across the University of Nevada, Reno. Some disciplines, however, have their preferred data repositories. If those other repositories meet your funding requirements you can keep using them.
• Dryad publishes all submitted data under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) licensing, which means that the public is able to see and use the data for their own purposes without use restriction. Of course, other researchers can cite your datasets obtained from Dryad using the DOI and your author details. However, Dryad does not accept any files with licensing terms that have any copyright restrictions on them. Most numeric data should be in the public domain and thus free of copyright restrictions, but text, image, and videos sometimes are protected by copyright. If you produced the data or are the copyright owner, you can opt to release these into the public domain, but if you are not the copyright owner, then you should not upload those data to Dryad. You can also consider using the University’s institutional repository, ScholarWolf, as a place to share this data if you do not wish to completely release your copyright in it. For more information, please see Good data practices: Removing barriers to data reuse with CC0 licensing or see the University Libraries’ Copyright Guide. You can also contact Scholarly Communications & Social Sciences Librarian Teresa Schultz for more help.
• Dryad accepts most file formats for data deposition (text, spreadsheets, video, photographs, code). However, it encourages users to use non-proprietary, open data formats (like CSV for tabular data instead of Excel files) for better long-term preservation and accessibility.
• Dryad allows for a total of 300GB per dataset submission. Individual files must not exceed 10GB each. Please check the latest guidelines on for additional details.
• Dryad will prompt you to upload any related files needed to understand and interact with the data, such as code. However, as Dryad’s aim is to house only datasets, it will prompt you to upload these file types to another open repository, Zenodo, as part of the process. Zenodo works seamlessly within Dryad, so you will not have to upload these separately.

Yes, you can update the metadata after submitting a dataset.

You can enter something such as “TBD” or “Not yet assigned” and then update this field once your paper has been accepted.

A link to these works in Zenodo will be provided as part of your data record in Dryad, underneath Related Works.

Although Dryad will prompt you to upload these files to Zenodo, they will not prevent you from uploading them as part of your dataset to Dryad, if you would prefer to keep them all together and the supplementary files could reasonably be considered data as well (i.e. no data figures or copyrighted material).

However, keep in mind Dryad’s file size limits.

If you have questions you can contact the Libraries Research Data Services.