Welcome to the first edition of our Data Update. In this recurring newsletter piece, we reflect on recent progress and provide a glimpse into what lies ahead for our data-driven endeavours.

Overview

Our continued involvement in the EU-funded WorldFAIR project has produced recommendations and guidelines for implementing FAIR data across the global Geochemistry community via two new peer-reviewed reports.

A big shout out to the authors of the reports Alex Prent (Project Leader, AuScope), Lesley Wyborn (ANU) and Angus Nixon (UAdelaide) for their ongoing commitment to the international Geochemistry community through their work in the OneGeochemistry collaboration!

Simon Hodson on internationally integrating data and Cassandra Price on integration and protection of Indigenous knowledges and science through Indigenous data sovereignty. Source: Integrated Earth 2023.

The AuScope Geoscience Research Data Repository has been under development by our CSIRO-based AVRE team and is scheduled for launch later this year. This new data resource has been built to house our long-tail/smaller-volume datasets that don’t already have access to an appropriate domain or institutional repository.

Our repository has been designed to ensure geoscience datasets can be stored with appropriate metadata, for example geolocation, that are often not available in generalist repositories.

Workshops

Repository workshops will be held in the coming months! If you have or know of datasets that are in need of some TLC and FAIR-ification, please contact Rebecca directly.

Dr Robin Burgess (ARDC) explains FAIR and CARE Principles. Source: DARE ARC Centre

Both of these activities are of strategic importance to AuScope and have been informed by the claim that AuScopes Research Data Systems are:

Designed, developed, and managed to ensure data and data products align with the FAIR principles.
Operated and governed at international best practices and agreed discipline standards.
Recognised by external stakeholders through leadership, development and collaborative problem-solving.

These three claims are used to scope, prioritise and evaluate AuScope Research data activity, investment and strategic planning.

Looking ahead

We continue to have storage and compute available through our NCI partnership, with access via this application template. We are approaching the end of our initial 2-year compute and storage allocation, with its usage and impact up for review. Please consider your needs over the next year or so and get in touch if you will be needing this resource.

Apply for NCI storage

We have been involved in a number of consultations, roundtables, drafts and discussions on the soon-to-be-released National Digital Research Infrastructure Strategy, and we are hopeful that it will reflect the needs of our diverse community. We’ll be sure to communicate any relevant outcomes with you as they come to hand.