STATUS REPORT ON THE NATIONAL eRESEARCH CAPABILITY
Response by the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL)
This response was prepared on behalf of CAUL by the CAUL Research Advisory
Committee and the CAUL Executive.
Contact the CAUL Office at caul@caul.edu.au or 02 6125 2990
28 August 2014, updated 23 September 2014
Introduction
The Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) is pleased to have the opportunity to
make a submission to the Status Report on the National eResearch Capability. CAUL, as
the peak leadership organisation for university libraries in Australia, seeks to enhance the
value and capacity of Australian university libraries and to influence scholarship, learning,
and information policies and practices relevant to Australian higher education. Our
members are the University Librarians or equivalent of institutions which have
representation on Universities Australia.
CAUL is committed to strengthening the role of university libraries as partners in the
research process and in promoting their libraries’ unique contribution to scholarship and
scholarly communication. The contribution made by university libraries is critical to the
success of Australia’s higher education system, one of the chief components of a successful
national research and innovation system. Of particular relevance is CAUL’s encouragement
of, and involvement in, open scholarship initiatives, including the development of members'
capacity in provision of repositories, research data management services and involvement
in government research assessment programs.
Over the past few years the role of university libraries has been changing to provide greater
support for research through:
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provision of open access repositories to store, promote and preserve the digital
scholarly assets and outputs of universities;
management and, increasingly, curation, of research resources such as datasets
and digital collections;
publication, especially electronic and often open publication, of material based on
research; and
research data management services, systems, policy and advice
Further details about CAUL and its activities can be found at http://www.caul.edu.au.
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Submission
This submission addresses the following four (of nine) main elements of the National
Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) program in which member libraries
have been most involved, addressing each against the elements suggested where
appropriate.
2. Australian Access Federation (AAF)
3. Australian National Data Service (ANDS)
6. National eResearch Collaboration, Tools and Resources (NeCTAR)
9. Research Data Storage Infrastructure (RDSI)
2. Australian Access Federation (AAF)
Appropriateness and take-up
The AAF has delivered a valuable framework to enhance researcher collaboration, with all
Australian universities being members of the AAF. University libraries have been involved in
the implementation of some NeCTAR projects which use AAF authentication. The AAF has
been used to enable researchers’ access to numerous project-based infrastructure and
collaborations. A growing, but still relatively small, number of publishers can work with
Shibboleth authentication and have joined the AAF list of services.
Governance & Lessons Learned
Perhaps the inclusion of a CAUL representative on the AAF Executive Committee may have
assisted to extend and enhance the use of AAF provisioning to publisher and other
scholarly resources.
Take-up
Research groups, projects and publishers continue to adopt the AAF..
University libraries can and do play a role in referring researchers to the AAF for the
provision of services to research groups.
CAUL members have not generally seen the benefits of accessing publisher resources
using Shibboleth instead of IP authentication. The advantage of IP authentication is that it
requires minimal set-up and works seamlessly via EzProxy or similar systems. Also as not
all publishers are Shibboleth-enabled, libraries would be required to maintain dual
authentication systems.
Without a central imperative, or significant and clear improvements on current services and
access, few libraries have opted to implement Shibboleth authentication for the relatively
few publisher resources or to local resources currently available, and only on an ad-hoc
basis.
Comparable developments / comparisons
Shibboleth authentication has been used in the UK to provision access to publisher
resources to universities. The move to Shibboleth, as with its predecessor Athens, was a
direct result of not having a comprehensive IP authentication option across UK universities.
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3. Australian National Data Service (ANDS)
Appropriateness
CAUL has a strong working partnership with ANDS and through this partnership our
members, recognise the contribution that ANDS has made to the whole university research
community, including libraries, through the development of infrastructure, expertise and
services, assisted by the implementation of many institution-specific funded projects. It is
unlikely these developments in infrastructure and expertise could have been achieved
operationally without the funded ANDS program. ANDS has provided leadership in the
development of a research culture which manages, describes and shares data. The
establishment of ANDS was very timely, as the discussion on research data management
has become very active in recent years. ANDS has given Australia a leading voice
internationally in this discussion.
What may now be valuable is a national approach which better links research outputs in a
more holistic way – from data through to tools and publication.
Contribution to technology platform
The development of the Research Data Australia repository and institutional metadata
repositories for capturing data descriptions has created a valuable registry of Australian
research datasets. Sustaining the Research Data Australia service will be necessary if we
are to continue to advance research data sharing.
Funding to build institutional metadata repositories has enabled development of a number of
solutions based on RedBox and VIVO open software solutions. Development of, and
support for, the RIF-CS metadata schema promoted the importance of data description in
the management, sharing and discovery of research data.
ANDS’ support of the DataCite Digital Object Identifier (DOI) standard has positioned the
whole Australian sector well as it is increasingly required by international publishers when
making research data available. The centralisation of this service has been more efficient
than all institutions pursuing it individually. ANDS’ recent role in advocating the use of
ORCID identifiers for researchers looks to be similarly useful. CAUL supports the use of
this type of persistent identifier for long term access to research.
ANDS projects also funded many data capture projects which have fed data and metadata
to institutional storage. This has been widely beneficial across the sector.
Governance
The ANDS Steering Committee has been able to ensure that benefits are received by the
wider academic community. ANDS has encouraged units within institutions, e.g., Library
and Research Offices to work collaboratively to encourage 'better research through better
data'. The majority of CAUL member institutions received some funding from ANDS
commensurate with their size, and this has enabled a broad spread of new research data
management services, practice and capability to be developed and supported. ANDS
actively sought advice from the sector, and has encouraged both internal and external
collaborative practices including a community or communities of practice.
Take-up
All universities have benefited from the ANDS program through the semi-competitive project
funding process, and through its education programs. Most institutions have developed a
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research data metadata repository which can contribute data descriptions to Research Data
Australia, many of which are operated and managed by CAUL members.
The CAUL members have also benefited from the capability building opportunities that
ANDS projects funded, with a wide range of staff being able to work with researchers and
other parts of their institutions.to develop and support research data management. Before
the ANDS funding, few institutions had institutional research data management policies but
now most do. CAUL members have generally been able to be part of the process of
creating them as a result of ANDS funding and training.
Universities have been able to operationalise research data management processes, and
the population of their respective metadata repositories to varying degrees, relative to
institutional preparedness, strategy and funding. Impact on research culture and practices
continues to develop as researchers become aware of research funding agency policies
and benefits of open data, and CAUL members have been an active part of this process.
Lessons learned
The approach taken by ANDS to fund the development of both a central and institutional
metadata repositories presented some risks, however these were largely successfully
managed. The separation of responsibility for storage (to ARCS/RDSI) and metadata/data
management (to ANDS) did create some inefficiencies and confusion, and the
establishment of a single governance model going forward would simplify planning and
expenditure.
There is some feeling in the sector that the RIF-CS metadata scheme, although highly
functional, is too complex to ever be rolled out to researchers to describe their datasets
directly, and it is suggested that simpler tools or a RIF-CS Lite schema be developed to
promote self-description of datasets by researchers. This might be a suitable project for
future funding.
Comparable developments / comparisons
The ANDS program has positioned Australia as a world leader in research data
management and open data.
6. National eResearch Collaboration, Tools and Resources (NeCTAR)
Appropriateness
The NeCTAR program has funded a wide variety of virtual laboratories and eResearch tools
which serve the disciplinary needs of many research communities in Australia. These
services could not have been produced without the leadership and funding provided. While
most CAUL members have had little direct involvement in NeCTAR projects, some libraries
have had the opportunity, through these projects, to collaborate more with Information
Technology staff/groups and researchers..
Governance
The competitive funding process may have created capacity issues for many institutions
with a sense that institutions needed funding and dedicated expert staff resources to bid for
research funds. Some projects were not successful in achieving a second tranche of funds
and so could not reach their full potential.
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Take-up
There is some feeling in the marketplace that although supported and represented through
the HUNI project, the social sciences and humanities remain largely underrepresented in
the range of funded projects.
Lessons learned
CAUL provided a response to the NeCTAR consultation paper in 2010 and at that time
noted a concern about possible confusion in the research community between ANDS and
other providers. Specifically, services with names such as the Research Data Storage
Infrastructure (RDSI) and the Research Cloud may confuse the intended audience. At that
time, CAUL recommended that NeCTAR and ANDS determine a joint communication
strategy or otherwise make the demarcation and means of engagement clearer.
NeCTAR ran webinars and workshops to help spread new knowledge and skills amongst
developers to try to standardise approaches to common problems
9. Research Data Storage Infrastructure (RDSI)
Contribution to technology platform
CAUL believes that robust storage infrastructure is an essential complement to research
data management initiatives and that the development of usable interfaces for authors and
end users is a work in progress and this work will ensure datasets are discoverable.
RDSI nodes have been implemented in collaboration with state based eResearch service
providers to various timelines and degree of completion to date. Some nodes still require
the provision of considerable technical support in order for researchers to use them, as user
friendly researcher interfaces are still in development.
Governance
Many decisions appeared to be made without reference to related projects such as ANDS,
and stakeholders such as CAUL were rarely consulted.
Take-up
Datasets change in significance over time and the classification of potential datasets for
storage has presented problems. The service continues to be developed with author
interfaces and services which would promote self-service. At present the deposit of
datasets requires significant support from IT professionals. Increased scale of the service
to more authors will be possible through the development of author side interfaces for
deposit, metadata creation and rights management. Service providers should be providing
the home institutions of authors with reports on collaborations and data deposited, so library
staff (or data management staff in other departments) can add records to metadata
repositories and curate the datasets as a managed institutional resource.
Lessons learned
Partnering with state based research support agencies has proved effective, however
agencies have tended to customise the implementation to local conditions which has
resulted in some duplication in development work, for the same desired outcome. The data
storage application process could consider that research good enough to be funded by
agencies such as the ARC and NHMRC should be considered important enough to store.
Author side services and interfaces could have been developed at a national level, or better
shared across service providers in order to ensure timely delivery.
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While the existence of the data storage infrastructure has been beneficial, more work needs
to be done to ensure its proper ongoing management and to ensure that the maximum
benefit can be derived. The focus of RDSI on hardware has meant that some aspects of
research data management have been neglected. Again, the artificial division between
ANDS and ARCS/RDSI meant that there were inefficiencies in the implementation of this
infrastructure.
Conclusion
Continued national investment in research information infrastructure will be critical to
Australia’s competitive position through research and innovation. At the very minimum it is
critical that we sustain the significant amount of valuable services and infrastructure
currently underpinning research if we are to retain and realise the benefit from valuable
research data and tools already in existence.
As library and information professionals, CAUL recommends that any future governance
and investment model realises the value of taking a holistic approach to the research
lifecycle, linking investment in research data, scholarly outputs, publications and tools, to
form a sustainable national research information ecosystem.
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