Sydney, Australia 9-13 Nov 2009 3 rd eResearch Australasia Conference Publish My Data: Brought to you by the services of ANDS and ARCS, and the letter D. Dr Adrian Burton 1 , Dr Andrew Treloar 2 1 Australian National Data Service, Canberra, Australia, adrian.burton@ands.org.au 2 Australian National Data Service, Melbourne, Australia, andrew.treloar@ands.org.au INTRODUCTION The Australian National Data Service (ANDS) formally commenced operations in January 1, 2009. ANDS is funded through FY 10/11 to make progress towards a number of ten year objectives for data management: A. A national data management environment exists in which Australia’s research data reside in a cohesive network of research repositories within an Australian ‘data commons’. B. Australian researchers and research data managers are ‘best of breed’ in creating, managing, and sharing research data under well formed and maintained data management policies. C. Significantly more Australian research data is routinely deposited into stable, accessible and sustainable data management and preservation environments. D. Significantly more people have relevant expertise in data management across research communities and research managing institutions. E. Researchers can find and access any relevant data in the Australian ‘data commons’. F. Australian researchers are able to discover, exchange, reuse and combine data from other researchers and other domains within their own research in new ways. G. Australia is able to share data easily and seamlessly to support international and nationally distributed multidisciplinary research teams. (Towards the Australian Data Commons, p. 6) To deliver against these objectives, ANDS has four inter-related programs of activity (Developing Frameworks, Providing Utilities, Seeding the Commons, Building Capabilities). ANDS also funds specific development activity towards the aims of the Providing Utilities and Seeding the Commons programs under the banner of the National e- Research Architecture Taskforce (NeAT). The ANDS vision for the Australian research-producing sector can be summarized as more researchers re-using and sharing more data more often. ANDS DISCOVERY In order for researchers to re-use and share data, they need to know that it exists. Discovering research data collected and maintained with public funding is one of the core aims of ANDS as articulated in Towards the Australian Data Commons. It is a fundamental requirement for ANDS to ensure that researchers be provided with high quality discovery over and access to research data in a form that makes sense to them. To that end, ANDS is committed to building some pieces of the discovery puzzle, while others have already been built, and other pieces again are being built for specific disciplines through other parts of NCRIS, and in some cases through specific NeAT projects. Sometimes, researchers will gain access directly to the data (most likely when the data is already well understood). In other instances the access may go via information about that data (perhaps described in its metadata, or a relevant document) or to the collection within which the data sits. These latter cases will provide the searcher with a broader perspective on the potential relevance of the data. In order for ANDS to achieve all this, the data needs first to be stored somewhere. Despite the references to research repositories and data management in objectives A, B and C above, ANDS is not funded to provide data repositories. This was a deliberate decision of the funding agency, and was made an implementation requirement because there already existed at least two possible solutions that provided data storage or could be used to provide it. These were institutional repositories (installed at all Australian universities under the ASHER program in 2007 and 2008) and the data fabric being built out by the Australian Research Collaboration Service (ARCS). During the ANDS Establishment Project, led by one of us (Treloar), the decision was made for ANDS to work closely on the co-ordination of ANDS and ARCS services to ensure that users receive an experience that is both positive and as seamless as possible. This paper describes one of the first fruits of this activity – a combined service called Publish my Data. PUBLISH MY DATA Phase 1 of Publish My Data is an online service which does not enable machine-to-machine transactions. It provides a GUI interface for use by individual publishers, who will usually be researchers. This service will be rolled out in a