Ms. Jo Croucher1, Mr. Andrew Robinson1, Honorary Professor Lesley Wyborn1, Dr. Yiling Liu1, Dr. Hannes Hollmann1, Dr. Nigel Rees1, Dr. Ben Evans1, Dr. Rebecca Farrington2
1National Computational Infrastructure, , Australia, 2AuScope, Australia
Biography:
Jo Croucher is a data librarian based at NCI Australia. Her scientific background includes experience in health research. In her previous role at Library Repository Services at UNSW Sydney, she supported data curation projects across a wide range of disciplines including engineering, medicine and the creative arts. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2156-8637
Andrew leads the Data Management teams at NCI Australia. Since training as a Software Engineer and Computer Systems Engineer he has worked in and led teams in bioinformatics, research software engineering, data management and general software/IT support for 24 years. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1127-6646
Dr. Lesley Wyborn is an Honorary Professor at ANU at the NCI and at the Research School of Earth Sciences. She also works part time for ARDC. She had 42 years’ experience in GA in mineral systems and geochemistry research, as well as in data management. Since leaving GA in 2014 has continued her research into many aspects of Data Science as applied to geochemistry, geophysics, data quality, versioning of datasets, as well as the development of transparent high-performance national-scale datasets for use in HPC environments. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5976-4943
Dr. Yiling Liu is a climate scientist and data manager. She completed her PhD at the Climate Change Research Centre of the University of New South Wales before working at National Computational Infrastructure of Australia as a research data management specialist. She leads the Data Collections team at NCI. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4014-2639
Dr. Hannes Hollmann holds a MSc in geophysics from the University of Kiel, Germany and completed his PhD at the University of Tasmania focusing on applying seismic methods to Antarctic snow and ice. Hannes now works as a Research Data Management Specialist, focusing on curating new datasets and enhancing their value by aligning them with the FAIR principles. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6113-1627
Dr. Nigel Rees completed a BSc (Hons) at The University of Adelaide in petroleum engineering, geology and geophysics in 2010 and worked in the petroleum industry for three years. Since completing his PhD in magnetotelluric geophysics (2016) at The University of Adelaide, he has worked at NCI initially as a Research Data Management Specialist and now as a Senior Research Environment Specialist (Geophysics) focusing on enabling HPC techniques on large volume geophysical data sets. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6216-1262
Dr. Ben Evans is the Deputy Director for HPC and Data Innovation, and Chief Scientist at NCI. Since completing his PhD in Mathematical Physics (ANU), and a HPC and Data national leader for 30 years. Ben leads the climate, weather and geophysics activities at NCI. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6719-2671
Rebecca is the Director of Research Data Systems at AuScope Ltd, Australia’s national provider of Research Infrastructure for the Geoscience community. Prior to this, she was a Senior Research Fellow within the School of Geography Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and an Academic Convenor on the Petascale Campus Initiative (Chancellery) at The University of Melbourne. With research expertise in computational fluid dynamics, she is passionate about developing community-led data and compute-intensive research initiatives and supporting the people behind them. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2594-6965
Abstract:
Usage metrics are an important tool for measuring the value of research infrastructure investment. COUNTER is a global emerging standard that has been previously used to track the usage of electronic resources such as ebooks and online journal articles. In 2018, the COUNTER Code of Practice for Research Data Usage Metrics (COUNTER RD) was released to enable standardised reporting by data repositories. It details specific rules for capturing, processing, recording and sharing data usage and is an established framework for monitoring and providing standardised data use reporting. These types of metrics support benchmarking research infrastructure and tracking impact of research investment for data providers, researchers, repository administrators, and funding agencies.
A case study trialling the use of COUNTER RD by the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI Australia) was undertaken as part of the 2030 Geophysics Collections Project, co-funded by AuScope, the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) and the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC).
The trial revealed some challenges associated with implementing the COUNTER RD standard, particularly with respect to capturing the complexity of data usage via HPC facilities. Although NCI’s network accessible data download service (THREDDS) successfully utilised the COUNTER RD approach, it faced limitations in accurately tracking direct access to datasets stored on the Gadi supercomputer for HPC and data-intensive applications. Critically for the current scientific applications, direct access is a popular and powerful way for researchers to analyse this class of data, yet difficult to capture using existing usage tracking frameworks.