The portal of the Australian Supersite Network (ASN) is the first port of call for researchers, analysts and policy writers who want snapshot information about research conducted at each of the supersites.
Anyone can register to use the portal, which has been up and running since last year. At the moment there are 20 public records in its repository, as well as some private ones. The records describe experiments conducted at ASN sites and link to the datasets when possible. A TERN data officer has recently been appointed and will commence loading new data from the supersites at the start of 2012.
Users can download datasets from the repository and post comments about data records that are attached to the relevant record. They can find research publications by dataset owners, as listed in the National Library of Australia’s Trove catalogue, by clicking on the ‘View Publications’ link next to the data owners’ name in the metadata record. ASN publications are also listed on the supersites website.
Records on the ASN repository will be automatically fed to the TERN environmental data portal and will be registered with Research Data Australia, a federally funded project to increase the visibility of Australian research. The ASN is investigating how to link the repository to others nationally, and to international networks such as Data Observation Network of Earth (DataONE), which is an initiative to create a data sharing and exchange network.
Downloading and using the data will be subject to a TERN-wide licence, which is expected to be compliant with the Australian Government Open Access Licensing Framework, AusGOAL.
Work has started on assigning each dataset a unique reference number, called a digital object identifier (DOI), which will allow easy citation of datasets in publications. However, the portal can be used now.
For more information, contact the ASN data manager Marco Fahmi by email, or phone him on (07) 3138 1284.
Published in TERN e-Newsletter December 2011.
