The research sector worldwide is experiencing enormous change driven by advances in information and communications technology (ICT). Research is increasingly characterised by national and international multi-disciplinary collaboration and most OECD countries and APEC members are investing heavily in those capabilities and the associated coordinating mechanisms.
The term ‘e-Research’ encapsulates research activities that use a spectrum of advanced ICT capabilities and embraces new research methodologies emerging from increasing access to:
- Broadband communications networks, research instruments and facilities, sensor networks and data repositories;
- Software and infrastructure services that enable secure connectivity and interoperability;
- Application tools that encompass discipline-specific tools and interaction tools.
e-Research capabilities serve to advance and augment, rather than replace traditional research methodologies, but there is a growing dependence on e-Research capabilities. Improved access to knowledge and information will enable researchers to perform their research more creatively, efficiently and collaboratively across long distances and disseminate their research outcomes with greater effect. Using e-Research, researchers can work seamlessly from desk-to-desk within and between organisations.
Entirely new fields of research, hitherto unavailable, are also emerging, using new techniques for data mining and analysis, advanced computational algorithms and resource sharing networks.
- Under the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS), the Platforms for Collaboration capability continues the Australian Government’s work to invest in and support technological platforms that enhance researchers’ ability to generate, collect, share, analyse, store and retrieve information. Platforms for Collaboration will specifically focus on national data management infrastructure to improve the management and use of research data, national high end computational facilities, and an interoperation and collaboration infrastructure to build a platform of inter-working national services across the shared research services.
- The Platforms for Collaboration capability builds on the work of the e-Research Coordinating Committee whose Final Report was accepted by the Australian Government in April 2007. See below for further background on this report.
- A building block to the NCRIS Platforms for Collaboration will be the Australian Access Federation (AAF). On 23 November 2006, the Minister for Education, Science and Training approved up to $4.8 million from the Systemic Infrastructure Initiative (SII) to establish the Australian Access Federation (AAF). The AAF will provide a shared infrastructure for all users working in multiple environments/ institutions to have seamless and secured access to resources online. Once developed, the AAF will provide a national authentication and authorisation framework for the higher education and research community, and will hence play a critical role ensuring the accessibility of NCRIS infrastructure and research data.
- The Systemic Infrastructure Initiative (SII) was announced by the Government in January 2001 as part of Backing Australia’s Ability – An Innovation Action Plan for the Future. The Government announced in Backing Australia’s Ability that $246 million would be allocated over five years ‘to upgrade the basic infrastructure of universities …’ to support research and research training. The SII was one of two major programme investments to precede and form the basis for NCRIS (the other being the Major National Research Facilities (MNRF) programme). Under the SII, significant achievements were evolving a single research and education network, the Australian Research and Education Network, establishing and progressing a collaborative approach to high performance computing in Australia; and facilitating discovery, access and dissemination of scholarly and scientific information.
- The Report of the e-Research Coordinating Committee to the Government set out the policy issues pertinent to Australia securing maximum benefit from the use of e-Research techniques. The Report proposed strategic directions that should be pursued; and proposed further steps that would allow generation of an implementation plan. It provided essential groundwork for deliberations leading to the investment in Platforms for Collaboration capability.
The Final Report is available under the Research Publications section of this website.