Enhancing Discoverability and Impact: Standardising NESP Marine and Coastal Data with Persistent Identifiers

The Challenge

The National Environmental Science Program (NESP) is an initiative funded by the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water. NESP supports over 100 research projects, helping to address some of Australia’s key environmental challenges. The program is categorised into 4 different Hubs, each with distinct research focuses, from biodiversity and sustainability to climate change. The Hubs generate a wealth of valuable data about the environment, which has huge potential for research, policy and decision-making. 

Data are often spread across numerous institutions, each with their own unique data management strategies. This makes the data difficult to discover by other users and makes it challenging for the government to track the impact of its research investment. 

To help find, organise and manage the data more effectively, datasets can be supplemented by metadata, which is a description of the data’s characteristics (its contents, location and format). The data can also be tagged with a persistent identifier (PID), which is a permanent, unique reference assigned to the data that allows them to be clearly found, retrieved and cited, regardless of where they are located.  

However, the metadata standards used by the NESP’s Marine and Coastal Hub, and most of the marine data community in Australia (ISO 19115-3), do not offer guidance on how to record these persistent identifiers, which can make the data difficult to find and integrate.

This project will develop a standardised approach to applying persistent identifiers in the metadata.  This standard will enable data discovery, interoperability and reuse, not only of NESP Marine Data, but can be adopted by other producers of marine data.

The Response

This project aims to ensure that the data arising from the NESP Marine and Coastal Hub is described in a consistent way and assigned with unique persistent identifiers at the organisational-level (Research Organisation Registry, ROR), project/program-level (Research Activity Identifier, RAiD), researcher-level (Open Researcher and Contributor ID, ORCiD), and dataset-level (Digital Object Identifier, DOI). 

The NESP Marine and Coastal Hub, supported by the ARDC, will establish standards for how persistent identifiers should be incorporated into metadata. The Marine and Coastal Hub will work with researchers and partner organisations to ensure these standards apply to all its metadata records. The project will also develop a community of practice guide to provide users with practical information on how to apply and use persistent identifiers in the field.

This initiative will allow data from the NESP Marine and Coastal Hub to be integrated into ARDC Research Data Australia (a data discovery service of the ARDC), providing a clear and consistent way to link, organise, and credit the data at a national scale to enable research and improved decision-making.
This project is part of the Domain Data Portals program.

Who Will Benefit

• researchers and research organisations 
• government 
• Australian marine community 
• non-government organisations

The Partners

• NESP Marine and Coastal Hub
• University of Tasmania (Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies)
• ARDC
• Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS)
• Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW)

Target Outcomes

The key outcomes of this project are to: 

• develop protocols that describe how persistent identifiers can be incorporated into existing ISO19115-3 metadata standards, enabling data from the NESP Marine and Coastal Hub to be integrated into Research Data Australia.
• work with researchers and partners to assign all NESP Marine and Coastal Hub records with persistent identifiers that can be incorporated into existing metadata records.
• develop a community of practice guide for ISO 19115-3 metadata records, including details for applying persistent identifiers and field use.

Key Resources

• Learn more about the NESP Marine and Coastal Hub