Publishing with NCI

Revision as of 22:57, 16 June 2021 by P.petrelli (talk | contribs)

NCI provides web services to publish data and metadata:

  • geonetwork catalogue to describe your dataset (i.e. a metadata repository) and associated DOI.  This will be the landing page for the DOI and will include a link to access the dataset.

Thredds Data Server this is a public data repository that provides access to the data, files can be downloaded from here or accessed via the OpenDAP protocol.


You have two options when publishing with NCI. the first is to publish your data as part of the CLEX Collection, your data will be hosted in the ks32 project and will be listed together with other CLEX data.

You can have your own data project, while the end result is the same, this is a slower way to publish the data which we used only in special cases. As you will have to apply for a new data project code, which includes finding a way to fund the disk storage needed. In either case we can help you providing the required information and processing the files, the steps listed below applies to both.

 

How ?

Create a data management plan (DMP) for your dataset using the CLEX Roadmap tool, if you don't have one already. If you do make sure to have filled in the third phase of the plan which deals with the "Publishing details". You then should share the plan with us when you're ready (share with paola.petrelli<at>utas.edu.au).

We will use the information on the plan to automatically generate the NCI and RDA records. Starting from the RDA record because this allows us to show you a draft before publication which is not possible for geonetwork. You can look at one of ARCCSS/CLEX records as an example of the kind of information required. 

We create a directory in /g/data/ua8/Publishing/CLEX_Data/ , using the acronym you chose for your dataset as name . This will include a draft for a readme file and one file for the chosen license. You can request access to the ua8 project via https://my.nci.org.au .

Move the data to the your dataset directory: /g/data/ua8/Publishing/CLEX_Data/<your-dataset>/tmp .

Get the dataset to a good quality level, necessary to share it successfully: metadata in the files should satisfy the CF conventions.  The readme file should contain a data description and both directory structure and filenames should be understandable and contain information on the data. You can use a CF checker yourself or we can check your files and tell you if there's anything which needs to be done.

Once NCI has minted a DOI for your dataset we can finalise the files by adding the global attributes that describe the publication details (doi, citation, title ..) following the ACDD conventions. Most of these can be defined based on the publishing section of the DMP. A draft bash code "attributes_cf.sh" is generated with the directory to facilitate this step.

Once the files are ready we will ask NCI to run their QA/QC checker on them, when they pass these quality checks the final version is copied to /g/data/ks32/CLEX_Data/ and the dataset is added to the thredds catalogue.


 

These might look like a lots of steps but each of them is fairly quick and we can usually run most of them for you provided that you filled in correctly the DMP and the variables in your files are reasonably well-described. 

We are using a new version of the DMP tool if you had already an account on the ARCCSS DMPonline you should be able to login with the same e-mail and password. If you have issue with your password you can reset it still using the same e-mail as before. If you do not have yet an account please use your university e-mail, only users from CLEX and the ARCCSS or approved collborators can create an account.

If your e-mail is not in the approved list Paola will receive an e-mail and will add your e-mail. If you are in doubt do not hesitate to ask for help by e-mailing our Helpdesk: cws_help@nci.org.au.

Other advice

  1. Think carefully about the license and rights terms, you'll find some options on the form itself, contact the helpdesk if there are other collaborators involved or any other special terms to be kept into account, the license will be virtually null if either the CLEX and/or your university don't hold the copyright.
  2. If you don't have one already make an ORCID identity which we can list in the record as well. The ARC is now encouraging the use of researcher identities to reference all your body of work when applying for a grant.
  3. Give some thought to what you want to publish, as well as satisfying the journal requirements, you want to make sure to include anything that could be useful to other researchers. This will increase the value of your data and potentially get more people to cite you. Look here for guidelines.

After publishing

We also create a collection record on Research Data Australia (RDA), a metadata catalogue service provided by ANDS. We do this because RDA has more visibility then the NCI catalogue, including being harvested by the new google dataset search toolbox. All these records are referencing each other so no matter where a user find your record it will always get to the same DOI, data access point and information.