Enhancing discoverability and impact of dispersed data through persistent identifiers in Australia

Australian environmental, biodiversity and climate research generates vast and diverse datasets from a wide variety of organisations across the research, government, public and private sectors: all with significant potential to inform research, management and policy. However, these data are frequently stored across multiple institutional and government repositories that lack consistent governance, adequate rich metadata and consistent application of externally-agreed community standards that are fundamental to machine-to-machine discovery and interoperability. As a result, valuable long-tail data remain difficult to find, access and reuse, limiting their impact and hindering translation into decision-making and environmental management. National consultation led by the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) confirmed that poor discoverability of domain-specific data is a major barrier to research progress and evidence-based decision-making .

The Domain Data Portals (DDP) program, delivered through the ARDC Planet Research Data Commons, addresses this challenge by improving access to FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) environmental and climate data held in distributed repositories. The program equips data stewards with tools and capabilities to make long-tail datasets FAIR for knowledge creation. This program partners with the National Environmental Science Program (NESP), Australia’s longest-running environmental research initiative, and the Australian Plant Phenomics Network (APPN). NESP is led by the Australian Government Department of Environment, Climate Change, Energy and Water (DCCEEW) and has 29 research partner organisations. NESP has four hubs in different environmental disciplines: 1)marine and coastal, 2) terrestrial ecology, 3) waste and sustainability, and 4) climate systems. APPN is an Australian National  Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) Facility with nine research nodes. The DDP program is working with data managers across the nodes and disciplines to harmonise data formats and workflows while respecting domain-specific requirements.

The program is delivering cohesive, domain-level discovery of NESP and APPN research outputs through a dedicated portal within ARDC Research Data Australia, which is a metadata aggregation service that enables findability, accessibility, and reuse of data for research from over one hundred Australian research organisations, government agencies, and cultural institutions. To enable Research Data Australia to programmatically harvest the NESP and APPN metadata into the relevant portal, ARDC and the DDP project leads have worked with the  institutions and repositories in scope to develop guidelines on how to include relevant Persistent Identifiers in the metadata for their funded research outputs and ensure rich FAIR-compliant metadata. By developing rich, standardised metadata for all project outputs and leveraging national infrastructure, including persistent identifiers, controlled vocabularies and data publishing services, the DDP program enables robust, efficient aggregation and national discoverability of datasets.

This approach supports consistent adoption of community standards and enhances data visibility, integration and reuse. The Domain Data Portals approach can be applied to other research communities in Australia to make their data FAIR, leveraging components of ARDC’s national information infrastructure.