Australian National Data Service

About ANDS (excerpts)

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.

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)