Better Metadata and Persistent Identifiers to Improve Climate Systems Hub Research Accessibility

The Challenge

The Climate Systems Hub of the National Environmental Science Program (NESP) is conducting a broad range of research aimed at improving environmental outcomes for Australia in the face of the challenges of climate change. Hub researchers are producing important datasets, with an emphasis on co-designed data products, to help stakeholders make well-informed decisions, particularly around climate adaptation. The hub has a comprehensive data management strategy that strives to maximise the impact of these data outputs by applying the FAIR data principles to make data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable, and enable maximum use and reuse of data for research. 

The first step in ensuring maximum impact of any data product is ensuring that research users can find it. Data catalogues such as ARDC Research Data Australia are valuable resources for users searching for data to help with their decision making. To ensure researchers can easily find data, the hub will incorporate the needs of the ARDC into the hub data management strategy to ensure data is findable on the Research Data Australia catalogue. This is particularly true of persistent identifiers (PIDs) that ARDC recommends and requires for harvesting of metadata and ingestion into Research Data Australia.

The Response

Through collaboration with ARDC, this project will improve metadata and PIDs to improve the accessibility of the Climate Systems Hub research.

It will deliver:

• a complete record of all data products published by the hub with details of where they are published (repositories), and the metadata schemas that were used. This will ascertain which repositories are used and which should be supported for future data products
• an approved list of data repositories for future data publication
• an approved metadata schema that captures all information required for those repositories as well as that needed by ARDC to harvest the metadata
• a set of persistent identifiers that must be used for each dataset, including ORCiDs for researchers, DOIs for data sets, and PIDs for institutions and the hub to support discovery, access, interoperability and reuse.

The project will work with researchers, project leads and data leads to implement the consistent use of the metadata schema, the repositories, and the persistent identifiers. 

This project is part of the Domain Data Portals program.

Who Will Benefit

• researchers and research organisations
• government
• industry
• non-government organisations

The Partners

This project is led by the Climate Systems Hub of the National Environmental Science Program, via the Bureau of Meteorology and the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW), in partnership with the ARDC.

Data contributors:

• CSIRO
• ANU
• UNSW
• UTas
• UMelb
• Monash Uni
• Federation Uni
• Australian Climate Services

Data host/steward:

• NCI

Partner:

• ACCESS-NRI

Target Outcomes

These processes and guidelines created through this project will ensure that all data created through the Climate Systems Hub is made accessible and findable, (particularly through ARDC Research Data Australia), and that all details of datasets can be correctly identified and harvested. 

Ultimately, this will benefit research users who will be able to more easily discover and access data sets, thus increasing their impact for environmental decision making in Australia.

Key Resources

Learn more about the NESP Climate Systems Hub