Dryad is also a non-profit membership organization registered in the US, providing a forum for all stakeholders to set priorities for the repository, participate in planning, and share knowledge and coordinate action around data policies.

Dryad curators review submitted data files and perform quality control on metadata descriptions before inclusion of new content in the repository.

Members may be independent journals, societies, publishers, research and educational institutions, libraries, funders, or other organizations that support Dryad's mission.

Dryad is a nonprofit organization that provides long-term access to its contents at no cost to researchers, educators or students, irrespective of nationality or institutional affiliation.

Dryad’s submission fees are designed to sustain its core functions by recovering the basic costs of curating and preserving data.

DryadUK was a Jisc-funded project run from the British Library and the University of Oxford, in partnership with NESCent, the Digital Curation Centre, and Charles Beagrie Ltd.

In 2019, Dryad announced a partnership with fellow data-repository Zenodo to co-develop new solutions focused on supporting researcher and publisher workflows as well as best practices in software and data curation.

Dryad was originally built upon the open source DSpace repository software, developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Hewlett-Packard.