Dryad is an international repository of data underlying peer-reviewed articles in the basic and applied biosciences. Dryad enables scientists to validate published findings, explore new analysis methodologies, repurpose data for research questions unanticipated by the original authors, and perform synthetic studies. Dryad is governed by a consortium of journals that collaboratively promote data archiving and ensure the sustainability of the repository.

Award winning SHERPA is investigating issues in the future of scholarly communication. It is developing open-access institutional repositories in universities to facilitate the rapid and efficient worldwide dissemination of research. SHERPA services and the SHERPA Partnership are both based at the Centre for Research Communications at the University of Nottingham.

Leslie Carr
Southampton, Hampshire, United Kingdom
I am an e-researcher in e-Research, a repository manager, the Technical Director for EPrints repository software and the Director of EPrints Services, a repository hosting company that funds software development for EPrints. I am also a Director of the Web Science Doctoral Training Centre at Southampton, where we run MScs and PhDs about the impact of the Web on human society, and vice versa..

Long-term preservation and stewardship of scientific data and research-related information are vitally important to future science and scholarship. Scientific data archives can offer capabilities for managing and preserving disciplinary and interdisciplinary data for research, education, and decision-making activities of future communities of users. Meeting the requirements for a trusted digital repository will help to ensure that today’s collections of scientific data will be available in the future. A continuing self-assessment of a long-term archive for interdisciplinary scientific data is being conducted to identify the additional steps needed for it to become a trustworthy repository. Recommendations include a strategy for collaborative organizational sustainability, a model for submission and workflow to ingest interdisciplinary scientific data into a repository, and a plan for facilitating intra-organizational transfer between repositories.

Digital data repositories ought to support immediate operational needs and long-term project goals. This paper presents the Dryad repository's metadata best practice balancing of these two needs. The paper reviews background work exploring the meaning of science, characterizing data, and highlighting data curation metadata challenges. The Dryad repository is introduced, and the initiative's metadata best practice and underlying rationales are described. Dryad's metadata approach includes two prongs: one addressing the long-term goal to align with the Semantic Web via a metadata application profile; and another addressing the immediate need to make content available in DSpace via an extensible markup language (XML) schema. The conclusion summarizes limitations and advantages of the two prongs underlying Dryad's metadata effort.

The eScholarship Editions collection includes almost 2000 books from academic presses on a range of topics, including art, science, history, music, religion, and fiction.

Access to the entire collection of electronic books is open to all University of California faculty, staff, and students, while over 500 of the titles are available to the public. Print versions of many of the electronic books can be purchased directly from the publishers.

When even scholars wanting to do the right thing and hand off their work to a responsible party cannot find anywhere to go, when enabling digital communication and the preservation of its results is an altruistic act in libraries instead of the bedrock of our mission, when worthy digital projects die because we in libraries do not notice and reach out to them, when we ourselves can't see our way clear to sustaining digital materials… we have a serious systemic problem.

As budgets tighten, will these digital resources be able to survive and thrive?

This question is at the heart of the Ithaka Case Studies in Sustainability project, a multi-year, international exploration of the strategies being used to support digital initiatives over the long term. Twelve detailed case studies present the steps project leaders have taken to achieve this, with special attention paid to their strategies for cost management and revenue generation.