About the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC)
The Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) is building Australia’s research data infrastructure. We provide Australian researchers with access to national research data collections, cloud computing, platforms and data-intensive research skills training.
For over 10 years, we have been providing services to researchers across Australia. We work with all universities in Australia, medical research institutes, government agencies, overseas organisations and more.
How We Support Health and Medical Researchers
Dr Steffen Bollmann and Aswin Narayanan lead the development of the neuroimaging data analysis environment Neurodesk, now available through the ARDC Virtual Desktop Service.
Steffen Bollmann
Aswin Narayanan
National Imaging Facility Informatics Fellow, The University of Queensland
Professor James McCaw and his team have been modelling infectious diseases, including COVID-19, on the ARDC’s cloud computing service for 10 years.
James McCaw
Stay Up to Date: Get Your Guide for Data-ENABLED Research in Health and Medical Sciences
You’ll also receive our fortnightly newsletter ARDC Connect, which shares latest news, events, training and resources for data-intensive research in Australia.
Datasets for Health and Medical Research
Health Data Australia
Find and share health data for research.
Health Data Australia is a national catalogue of Australian health data.
On Health Data Australia, health and medical researchers can search for and request access to clinical trials datasets collected across Australia by universities, medical research institutes, clinical trials networks and health services. You can also find information that helps you understand those datasets, such as study protocols and data dictionaries.
The data is held and managed by the organisations responsible for the clinical trials. You can use Health Data Australia to submit an access request to the data owner.
ARDC Research Data Australia
Find, access and reuse data for research from over 100 Australian data sources.
Research Data Australia is an online portal for finding data for research and associated projects, researchers and data services. You can find, access and reuse data from more than 100 Australian research organisations, government agencies and cultural institutions, with most data immediately accessible online.
Research Data Australia caters specifically for researchers but is also relevant to policy makers, educators, industry and the business community.
Research Data Australia offers access to data in medical and health sciences and other areas of interest to health and medical researchers.
Tools for Health and Medical Research
ARDC Nectar Research Cloud
Accelerate your research with cloud compute resources, software and data that can be accessed anywhere. Start your 6-month trial.
The Nectar Research Cloud allows fast, remote access to reliable computational capabilities, software and data.
Australian researchers can use the Nectar Research Cloud to develop and host services including databases, data repositories, web services and tools, and large-scale research platforms or virtual research environments.
We host services for earth and environmental science researchers on the Nectar Research Cloud, which can save time, boost your productivity, facilitate collaboration and give you added power to conduct your research:
Virtual Desktop Service
Access extra computing capabilities through Neurodesktop or any of the 5 other desktops we offer, which you can easily set up in minutes.
Jupyter Notebook Service
Develop, combine and export computational notebooks and interactive visualisations.
BinderHub Service
Turn your code, data and computational environments into shareable, executable and reproducible Binder environments that can easily be used by collaborators and colleagues.
National GPU Service
Reserve GPUs and large-memory virtual machines in 16 flavours in advance for your research.
Preemptible Instances service
Access extra computational resources for a short period of time on demand.
The Nectar Research Cloud also hosts digital services provided by ARDC-supported projects and other National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) facilities, including Microscopy Australia and National Imaging Facility (NIF).
Services include:
- Degust – an interactive web tool for RNA-Seq exploration, analysis and visualisation
- iFeature – a Python toolkit and web server for calculating structural feature descriptors from protein and peptide sequences
- Stemformatics – a platform for quickly finding and visualising interesting genes in exemplar stem cell datasets.
We provide hands-on cloud computing training for all researchers. Topics include basic security and using containers on the Nectar Research Cloud.
To access our cloud computing training, visit the Nectar Research Cloud Learning and Training Support Centre.
ARDC Research Link Australia
Find information about research, industry, business and government for impactful innovation.
The RLA platform is designed for:
- researchers and publicly funded research organisations to find business and industry partners to translate their research discovery into the development of real-world products
- industry and businesses to find research collaborators to enhance their research and development (R&D) capabilities
- policy makers and governments to gain a picture of the national research capability.
Currently, the service utilises information on the following:
- over 805,500 researchers from ORCID
- over 1.8 million publications as linked from ORCID profiles – publication records are mainly from PubMed and Crossref
- over 310,000 organisation records from the Registry of Research organisations (ROR), the Australian Business Registry (ABR), Crossref and Wikidata
- over 88,000 funded activities, either directly from the Australian Research Council (ARC) and National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) or from ORCID profiles
- 132 instrument records from ARDC Research Data Australia.
You’ll be able to explore the data with interactive analytics dashboards for all research areas or specific domains, such as health and wellbeing research, and Aboriginal and Torre Strait Islander research. More dashboards will be added as more information on grants becomes available.
The ARDC is continuously incorporating a wider range of data sources (e.g. patent data), features and enhancements.
We Are Building the People Research Data Commons
To meet the needs of health and medical researchers, the ARDC is co-designing a People Research Data Commons (People RDC) with partners in academia, industry and government and with other national stakeholders. The People RDC will support health and biomedical researchers to develop nation-wide, cross-sector and multi-disciplinary data collections and digital capabilities. This will include:
- national FAIR health data assets – both existing and new or improved data collections
- platforms and solutions that enable researchers to collect or generate data, analyse those data and produce FAIR data outputs
- long-term research infrastructure and services to support the research data lifecycle
- expertise in data and digital research infrastructure
- governance, policy, technology, collaboration and participation frameworks to enable success.
The People RDC is a long-term national infrastructure program supported by the Australian Government. Learn more and register your interest.