ARDC People Research Data Commons Receives $19.29 Million

The ARDC welcomes the $19.29 million investment from the Australian Government’s 2023 National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) Funding Round to grow the People Research Data Commons (People RDC), which adds to its initial NCRIS funding in 2020. 

Dr Adrian Burton, Director, People Research Data Commons and Deputy CEO of the ARDC, said, “The further investment in the People RDC demonstrates the important role of digital research infrastructure to accelerate health and medical research for the benefit of the health and wellbeing of all Australians. After all, we all consume health services at some point in our lives.”

The new funding from the Australian Government will be invested through the ARDC’s co-design and co-investment approach to building digital research infrastructure. 

To support new research and translation for better health outcomes, the People RDC is delivering national digital health capability in 4 key data challenges encountered within digital health research, which were identified through extensive consultations with the research community:

• Data strategy and discovery: The data that health researchers need is distributed across government, research and health service sectors. Researchers and innovators face challenges knowing whether and where such data exists, and if so, how to access it.
• Secure data access: That health information of patients and research subjects must be kept secure and not disclosed during the process of health research or health service improvement. Data custodians therefore require researchers to use secure environments for data analysis. Researchers don’t always have secure environments for the data they want to share or access. Or when such secure environments exist, they can create data silos that hinder national-scale multidisciplinary collaborations.
• Data integration: To solve the grand challenges facing society, researchers seek insights by combining data from government, research, and health service providers. Since these data are collected in a wide range of scientific, business or operational contexts, they use different standards and structures which makes it difficult for researchers to bring these together. 
• Advanced analytics: Applying advanced analytics techniques like machine learning to national sensitive data collections across multiple secure data repositories raises data challenges that require innovative solutions.

Through building fundamental digital capabilities that address these challenges, the ARDC can meet the needs of diverse health and medical research communities throughout Australia in a strategic and comprehensive way.

Building on National Initiatives to Accelerate Health and Medical Research

The People RDC builds on our experience creating national digital research infrastructure for health and medical researchers. A major initiative of the People RDC is HeSANDA, the Health Studies Australian National Data Asset, a national initiative partnering with over 70 health organisations to promote the discovery and reuse of health studies data. The initiative launched Health Data Australia in July, a new catalogue to find and request access to clinical trial data. The initiative is also supporting a culture change within health organisations to encourage and enable ethically and secure sharing of research data. 

With the new NCRIS funding, the People RDC will build out Health Data Australia to enable discovery of a wider range of health studies data as well as NCRIS, government, and health services data that researchers want to locate and use in research. Once the right data is discovered and successfully requested for research, the new People RDC infrastructure will support its secure access, integration, and analysis. 

Thematic Research Data Commons for Enduring Digital Infrastructure

The People RDC is one of 3 national-scale Thematic Research Data Commons being established by the ARDC in partnership with the research community. The Thematic Research Data Commons are designed to meet Australia’s future research needs with long-term, enduring digital infrastructure. 

Each Thematic Research Data Commons integrates the ARDC’s underpinning compute, storage infrastructure and services with analysis platforms and tools. Each is supported by our expertise, and our work on developing community-agreed standards and best practices.

These coordinated, structured, and complementary activities are building data assets, tools, and skills that will constitute a national ‘knowledge infrastructure’ that enables Australian researchers to transform our lives.

The new funding from the Australian Government will be invested through the ARDC’s co-design and co-investment approach to building digital research infrastructure. 

Learn more and get involved by registering your interest in the People Research Data Commons.

Learn about the 2 other research data commons: 

• Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS) and Indigenous Research Data Commons
• Planet Research Data Commons for earth and environmental science research.

The ARDC is funded through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) to support national digital research infrastructure for Australian researchers.