The Dryad Digital Repository is a curated resource that makes research data discoverable, freely reusable, and citable. Dryad provides a general purpose home for a wide diversity of data types.

Dryad originated from an initiative among a group of leading journals and scientific societies to adopt a joint data archiving policy (IDAP) for their publications, and the recognition that open, easy-to-use, community-governed data infrastructure was needed to support such a policy. These remain Dryad's guiding principles.

Dryad's vision is to promote a world where research data is openly available, integrated with the scholarly literature, and routinely re-used to create knowledge. Dryad's mission is to provide the infrastructure for, and promote the re-use of, data underlying the scholarly literature.