About ANDS

ANDS has been structured as four inter-related and coordinated service delivery programs:

• Developing Frameworks
• Providing Utilities
• Seeding the Commons
• Building Capabilities

ANDS needs reliable enduring services for all Australian researchers.  A number of NeAT projects are being supported by ANDS to investigate, pilot and evaluate a range of data acquisition, storage, registry and discovery services.

ANDS People

• Governance structure
• ANDS staff list
• ANDS Technical Forum

ANDS Background

We live in an era where huge volumes of research data are being generated by scientists and researchers.  Almost all data is now born digital so the capacity to process, transform and transfer information will continue to expand.  Today's scientific instruments are able to generate terabytes of data.  Humanities and social science data is also being digitised in ever increasing volumes.  Institutions are now faced with the immensely difficult task of funding ways to store and manage data in a format that is accessible to other researchers for discovery and re-use.

ANDS Establishment Project

Vision

The high level vision for the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) is set out in  Towards the Australian Data Commons. (pdf file 2.61MB):

The development of ANDS 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 (p 3)

The process of developing the ANDS proposal and vision is documented at http://www.pfc.org.au/bin/view/Main/Data 

ANDS Objectives

The long term (ten year) objectives for data management within the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) are to:

• Transform collections of Australian research data into a cohesive network of research repositories
• Assist Australian research data managers to become experts in creating, managing and sharing research data under well formed and maintained data management policies
• Increase the amount of research data that is routinely deposited into stable, accessible and sustainable data management and preservation environments
• Provide opportunities for people to develop expertise in data management across research communities and institutions
• Enable researchers to find and access any relevant data in the Australian 'data commons'
• Enable Australian researchers to discover, exchange, reuse and combine data from other researchers and other domains within their own research in new ways
• Facilitate the sharing of Australian data to support international and nationally distributed multidisciplinary research teams

ANDS Scope

Institutions

ANDS will work with a variety of publicly funded institutions to achieve its aims.  The scope includes:

• All Higher Education Providers in Australia
• All research organisations that are publicly funded (for example CSIRO, GeoScience Australia, Bureau of Meteorology, ABS, AIMS, DsPI)

ANDS Community

The ANDS community consists of:

• ANDS service providers
• Consumers of ANDS services

Data

ANDS is concerned with data that is produced by researchers as well as data that is used by and accessible to them.

ANDS and the Australian Research Data Commons

The Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) will support the discovery of, and access to, research data held in Australian universities, publicly funded research agencies and government organisations for the use of research. The Australian National Data Service (ANDS) has a charter to build the ARDC. It will enable the construction of a range of ICT utilities to capitalise on and ensure greater use and re-use of existing data resources, as well as better management of new data generated in Australian research. For more information...