Publishing with NCI

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NCI is now providing web services to publish data and metadata. This include a geonetwork catalogue to describe your dataset (i.e. a metadata repository) and provide links to the dataset access point. Once you have a geonetwork record, NCI can mint a Digital Object Identifier for the dataset, as for papers a DOI makes the dataset easy to cite and to locate. The files are then made accessible to the public by using their TDS catalogue (THREDDS).

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.

There a few necessary steps to make your data available:

  1. Create a data management plan (DMP) for your collection 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@utas.edu.au).
  2. 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. 
  3. Still based on information from the DMP, we create a directory in /g/data/ua8/Publishing/CLEX_Data/. The directory will be named using the acronym you chose for your dataset and it will contain also 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 .
  4. Move the data to the your dataset directory: /g/data/ua8/Publishing/CLEX_Data*/<your-dataset>/tmp . * this could also be ARCCSS_Data depending on your affiliation.
  5. 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.
  6. 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. To apply most of these a draft bash code attributes_cf.sh is generated with the directory again based on the information stored in the DMP.  
  7. Once the files are ready we will ask NCI to run their QA/QC checker on them, if 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.

Managing your data is an essential part of the publishing process for more detailed information go to the Data management induction training.

You can find more information on geonetwork, RDA, thredds and the associated services in our data management tools page.

I am still working on this page and the Roadmap tool, any feedback on both is welcome! Look also to the other wiki pages under data services dedicated to the tool, data management in general and researcher identities for more information