This section provides background for the Australian university research community to the SII, and to the areas identified by the ARIIC for additional work.
The SII provides funding to improve the efficiency of the research infrastructure of universities. Systemic infrastructure is infrastructure which is of the broadest use to the largest number of Australian researchers.
New technologies are emerging which will change the way research is done. This is especially true when a large number of sensors, large amounts of data and/or high performance computing are involved. For example, high performance computing enables simulation as a methodology for replacing laboratory experimentation. Large numbers or inexpensive sensors allow monitoring and measurement of systems on a scale hitherto impossible. The possibility of linking many databases together may provide vital clues to solving problems which may currently be too complex to solve.
If managed well, these technologies will promote and permit collaboration and influence business, industry, government and society.
Digitally stored data and information are being generated at an unprecedented rate. If the current trends in research continue, we will create more data in the next five years than has been collected in the whole of human history. Properly managed, this data will form a major resource for researchers. Australia itself has a rich collection of data. Much is held in isolation and is under-utilised or only available to limited audiences. New approaches are needed in acquiring, sharing and integrating data in order to make research information, in general and that generated through new technologies, more accessible to academics, business and the public.
The sheer volume of research data generated will put significant strain on our existing infrastructure. Data curation and data preservation are set to become some of the biggest issues, particularly relating to images, sound and video generated through, but not restricted to, large scale science, and within these, indexing, retrieval, provenance and annotation.
At a national level there is a need for a clearer understanding of what the investment of public funds provides. For business to be able to invest it needs to be able to quickly and easily find out what research is being done. Australian research may well be at risk, in terms of being globally competitive, unless there is a concerted response to develop sustainable information infrastructure.
The present scholarly communication system is largely based on print-based business models. Presently the great majority of research and research related online resources are not presented in a consistent or systematic way. Therefore the discoverability of information about research and institutional performance is fragmented, and largely based individual efforts on the part of institutions to provide information about institutional performance.
Advances in online communication tools and electronic publishing, open access storage and the international standards will greatly enhance the discoverability of information. Efforts to develop databases are fostering new attention on the research information system and how researchers are engaging in this process.
Information about research and research performance
Universities are currently required to provide information about their research and research performance to many different parties, both within their institutions and externally for instance to governments. Although most do provide some information as a means of promoting their institution, individual institutions have each approached the matter of information dissemination differently.
Performance measures in Australia are predominantly focused on input and throughput process measures rather than on the collection of data regarding the social and economic outcomes of the higher education sector.
Universities are under increasing pressure to focus on the efficient allocation of resources, and on achieving demonstrable return on investment in those resources. At the same time, advances in information and communications technology are affecting the way in which research is conducted in Australia, and placing new and greater demands on the scholarly communication system.
Improving and standardising information infrastructure can ease the administrative burden of reporting while simultaneously increasing the quality and quantity of information which can easily, and efficiently, be provided.
Four major demonstrator projects are directly related to addressing these goals, namely:
- Meta Access Management System Project (MAMS)
- MAMS will provide an essential "middleware" component to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of Australia’s higher education research information infrastructure. It will develop a new conceptual architecture which is capable of supporting multiple, independent models, and which is implemented locally within organisations, with the potential for inter-institutional communication.
http://www.melcoe.mq.edu.au/projects/MAMS/ 
The Australian Research Repositories Online to the World (ARROW) - ARROW will identify and test a software solution or solutions to support best-practice institutional digital repositories comprising e-prints, digital theses and electronic publishing. It will develop a repository and associated metadata to support independent scholars (those not associated with institutions).
http://arrow.edu.au/
Towards an Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR) - APSR will have an overall focus on the critical issues of the access, continuity and sustainability of digital collections. It will also build on a base of demonstrators for digital continuity and sustainability, embedded in developmental repository facilities within partner institutions.
http://apsr.edu.au/ and
Australian Digital Theses Program Expansion and Redevelopment (ADT) - ADT will redevelop the existing central metadata repository of the Australian Digital Theses Program (ADT) to increase its coverage and utility to the national and international research community. The repository’s content will expand to include metadata about all Australian higher degree theses.
http://adt.caul.edu.au/adtariic.html
Collectively these are called the Federated Repositories of Digital Objects (FRODO) projects.
Work currently underway aims to develop the role of digital repositories which become an embedded and useful component of the information landscape, and through this, enhances the quality of learning and research. To build on these achievements, we need the involvement of interested partners for the collaborative development of sustainable information infrastructure to support a wide range of information management activities. For example, databases are extremely important for research. The interconnection of databases will make them even more useful.
We seek proposals for exemplar projects which may create tools, software, middleware and/or hardware and which demonstrate new techniques, and processes to build on effective information infrastructure that will facilitate accessibility. Project proposals will be expected to provide for their sustainability after the period of funding provided by SII. SII will not provide any ongoing funding for projects after that time.
Specifically we are seeking proposals which provide sustainable and innovative flexible solutions to one or more of the following.
- Maximising access to digital resources in Australian universities, especially regional universities
We recognise that systemic information infrastructure should be of the broadest use to the largest number of Australian researchers. There is a range of access to financial resources and technical expertise available to the different Australian universities for the development of information infrastructure. Ensuring maximum for the benefit of Australian researchers by including a range of universities, especially regional universities, in these projects will help achieve the desired outcomes for the systemic information initiative.
These projects should work collaboratively with, and build upon the findings of, the FRODO projects. They should take the next steps in providing information infrastructure for Australian universities by utilising the findings of the FRODO projects to demonstrate integrated solutions. This should provide improved information infrastructure ability meeting national and international standards enabling better:
- Exchange of information between research groups
The project should demonstrate development of software, protocols and standards to support the authorised exchange of research information between collaborating research members, regardless of location.
- Management of research resources, data and results
The project should expose research resources, data and results through well managed open access institutional repositories. There is now consistent evidence that this behaviour results in significantly improved exposure with consequent improved citations for research.
- Storage and preservation of research output
Preservation of research data and outputs, including publications, preserved in efficient and enduring repositories should be an integral part of the overall research strategy of the project. The research output must be future proofed against technological advances which might otherwise leave it inaccessible.
- Accessibility and re-use of research results
The project should be a platform to support innovation in the use of new technologies to explore new forms of authorship, publication and new ways of combining research results, present new content and find new audiences, thereby increasing the impact of Australian research.
This should include digital management of Australian research information through the federation of databases, institutional repositories and other resources. These should meet national and international standards to create, support, store, and make data and information discoverable.
An emphasis on upgrading the information infrastructure of regional universities to ensure improved collaboration with other universities would be a priority for projects under this category.
It is possible that this work might seek to undertake collaborative cross sectoral research in an area of national priority for Australia. The national research priorities are thematic and are underpinned by ‘priority goals’. These are:
If so, the aim of this work would be to demonstrate a real life application of national systemic information infrastructure in providing solutions for researchers through significantly improved infrastructure.
- Creating new types of digital libraries to manage extremely large data sets.
These projects will include the development of a web-enabled data and/or information network which would enable institutions to link data from diverse and large multi-centred national and international data sources more efficaciously, economically and efficiently than is possible to date. These new digital libraries will be necessary to deal with the data and information created from the next generation of experiments, simulations, sensors and satellites, and will require the establishment of best practice in digital curation.
Researchers who are potential users of grid services have a range of needs that will require imaginative and collaborative solutions. These researchers are typically performing experiments and gathering and processing existing data. This community is relatively small in numbers but the pressing need of these researchers is for more dynamic, timely and sophisticated data management storage and analysis than is presently available. A lack of cohesive approaches to data management has led to isolated personal storage of data. This is often on computers or DVDs. This means that often the only way to transfer data is by physically transporting it, rather than researchers being able to access it over the internet. Projects which might provide a one stop shop approach for this community to make this data easily available over the internet. It would also be useful for projects to address the need for capturing electronically, the workflow used by researchers and the sequence of databases accessed, to allow the researcher to reproduce the experimental results if required.
In biology and medicine, microarrays have become mainstream research tools. The large datasets and complex analyses from these and other next generation of sensors, measuring instruments, simulations and satellites present challenges for researchers. They must analyse the data, interpret and publish the results. Reviewers and publishers then need to decide on the suitability of papers, and readers must decide how to assess the quality of the paper presented. Given the wealth and quantity of this data it might not be enough to deposit data and disclose the research outcomes in a publicly available repository. In some cases, analyses may be developed on a case by case basis and they might not be easily reproducible. Projects should provide solutions whereby the research outcome becomes an interactive document that bundles primary data, statistical processing methods, figures and derived data together with the textual documentation and conclusions.
- Adopting a national approach to improving open access to the results of publicly funded research
The Government is in the process of establishing Quality and Accessibility Frameworks for Publicly Funded Research. In developing these Frameworks the Government has stated that they should:
- be transparent to government and taxpayers so that they are better informed about the results of the public investment in research;
- ensure that all publicly funded research agencies and research providers are encouraged to focus on the quality and relevance of their research; and
- avoid a high cost of implementation and imposing a high administration burden on research providers.
One of the best ways to make available the results of public investment in research is to make research outcomes as accessible as possible, and the best way to do this is to expose research output through open access repositories.
We are looking for projects which will work towards providing innovative and practical solutions to which make open access to research results a reality. This will need to take into account many complexities, for instance copyright legislation, university policies and funding provider policies.
We are also interested in projects that explore and attempt to solve some of the barriers to establishing open access archives and building national platforms for acquiring, sharing and integrating research data. The Government is interested in seeing publicly funded research being publicly available rather than being restricted.
Ineffective management of copyright and confusion about copyright boundaries is often an inhibitor for authors thinking about increasing impact through open access publishing of material in institutional repositories. Institutions should provide clear guidance to researchers, administrators and authors who feel challenged by these issues. In some cases guidance will definitely be needed to support more general establishment of repositories. In the life cycle of digital objects the roles of the original owner, the publisher, the copyright owner, the maintainer, and the archivist all have to be incorporated into the management fabric. As the material being captured for the repositories has already been published (such as for material that will be submitted to DEST for the research publications data collection) permissions may have to be obtained from publishers before full text can be made available online. A longer term strategy would see researchers being advised in advance to vary standard publisher contracts in order to allow deposit in open access repositories.
In addition to access to published data, access to raw data sets and databases may pose an additional barrier to efficient use and reuse of data. Access and use policies, or even the lack of these, may unnecessarily restrict other users who may want to search across the vast data libraries, access selected data, utilise integration services and repurpose the data.
Projects should attempt to solve some or all of these issues by bringing together a range of different and sometimes disparate groups, to coalesce in an attempt to provide open access to research.
- Providing effective linkages between sets of research information to enable seamless access by researchers.
These projects will provide effective linkages between research information to enable seamless access by researchers in discovering information quickly and easily. There are many potential applications. Researchers will be more able to effectively address the national thematic research priorities. Broader national benefits are also anticipated. For example, it is easy to see the benefits of being able to access and monitor disparate systems during a bushfire. We could instantly find out the levels of bushfire threat in an Australian summer across our drought stricken regions over the internet. We could access information held across states and territories, work with the Bureau of Meteorology to glean weather patterns and obtain information from our national parks experts to understand fuel levels, and access the latest results of CSIRO research.
Increasingly research information is being held in electronic repositories. Repository storage can allow flexible and innovative use of research material and datasets so that information can be used, re-used and re-purposed. Institutional repositories will be most useful to Australian and international research if they are web visible, predominantly open access, well structured and conforming to common international standards and protocols. Networked repositories provide a secure way of managing institutions and national intellectual effort.
There is also a strong argument to provide effective electronic linkages between information sets in different domains. Innovation often occurs in the interstices between different areas of endeavour. Business efficiency also comes about when a common electronic infrastructure can serve different domains, for example, e-research, e-learning, scholarly information and e-administration. Some guidance as to the technical development required may be found in the E-Learning Framework (ELF) which is under development by DEST and Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the UK. ELF structures may assist in creating electronic linkages that are useful for a number of domains.
These projects will help provide a technical solution to allow information sharing without the need for human intervention. This will be done in the invisible infrastructure components that underpin the information sharing. All technical solutions will be based on open technical standards and internationally agreed protocols so that there will be retrospectivity and ‘future proofing’ in building the sharing infrastructure.
Projects will address some of the underpinning technical aspects that allow information in individual repositories to be accessed and shared by researchers who have the appropriate authentication and authorisation. Potential projects will explore the complexity of authorisation models to encourage a more flexible approach to providing researcher access while applying high levels of security to the information contained in the data base. Innovative ways to manage intellectual property in the digital environment will need to be explored.
Common tools, systems and standards for the storage of and maintenance of online research materials and data need to be further developed.
These projects will take into account and build upon the findings of the work of the Meta Access Management Systems (MAMS) project.
Potential projects will also work to enhance the capacity to implement technical infrastructure, sharing expertise and knowledge networks and provide joint leadership in a number of areas. Implementation of current developments may also be well received as long as they provide useful feedback for developers and other institutions who are starting to implement the new technology.
Further develop an access management framework (including authorisation and authentication systems) that meet the needs of researchers and content providers, with the minimum necessary barriers to open access.