About ANDS

Current events

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.

For historical background, see ANDS Establishment Project

ANDS Brochure PDF (823 KB)

ANDS Brochure (PDF 823)

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)

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...