Business Models And Cost Estimation: Dryad Repository Case Study

Data attrition compromises the ability of scientists to validate and reuse the data that underlie scientific articles. For this reason, many have called to archive data supporting published articles. However, few successful models for the sustainability of disciplinary data archives exist and many of these rely heavily on ephemeral funding sources. The Dryad project is a consortium of bioscience journals that seeks to establish a data repository to which authors can submit, upon publication, integral data that does not otherwise have a dedicated public archive. This archive is intended to be sustained, in part, through the existing economy of scholarly publishing. In 2009, Dryad commissioned the development of a cost model and sustainability plan. Here we report the outcome of this work to date. The sustainability efforts of Dryad are expected to provide a model that may be exported to other disciplines, informing the scale needed for a sustainable “small science” data repository and showing how to accommodate diverse business practices among scholarly publishers, funding agencies and research