Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Australia's plan for access, preservation, and re-use of publicly-funded research data

Towards the Australian Data Commons:  A proposal for an Australian National Data Service, ANDS Technical Working Group, October 2007.  (Thanks to Charles Bailey.)  From the Overview:

The expression heard most often during the consultation process of developing the investment plan for the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy Platforms for Collaboration capability was, simply, “it’s all about data”....

The development of ANDS [Australian National Data Service] is intended to provide the essential meeting place where the Australian path forward for research data management can evolve and where a vision can be achieved. This vision will articulate over time policies and guidelines that are readily understood and interpreted while simultaneously creating exemplars of best practice covering:

  • research data ownership and the roles and responsibilities associated with ownership;
  • access to research data collected and maintained with public funding; and
  • best practice for the curation of experimental, research and published data....

The technical quality of the outcome will be determined by the ease with which research data and research outputs from all sources can be discovered and reused across disciplines and over time through an integration of repositories and data centres supporting national and specialist discovery services.

This paper is designed to encourage, inform and ultimately summarise the discussions around the appropriate strategic and technical descriptions of the Australian National Data Service....

From the body of the report:

While simplification is desirable, the obvious simplification of dealing only with public accessible data is not possible. The complexity in managing data for federated access and reuse begins when the data is collected, where access may rightly be strongly restricted, and continues throughout its lifecycle including its ultimate publication where some or all of the data is made public. Therefore, ANDS services and activities must encompass restricted access to data across its entire life cycle rather than merely considering data after it is released to open access....

ANDS will also need to assist those communities which have already developed separate, discipline specific ‘data commons’ to engage within this broader framework, so that the collective national investment in research data is made in ways that ensure the data can be more widely discovered and reused. This would involve registering the various repositories where data resides and providing access to the aggregated metadata so that data sources relevant to a discipline, community or project can be discovered, viewed, processed and reused....

The development of an Australian research data commons is framed around managing access to data stored in a network of repositories, sustained at an institutional level. It success will depend on Australian research data being routinely deposited into stable and sustainable data management and preservation environments.  Therefore ANDS will need to improve, supplement, and integrate the available repositories at institutions....