Presentation by Dr Steve McEachern, ADA, to the 'Unlocking value from publicly funded Clinical Research Data' workshop, cohosted by ARDC and CSIRO at ANU on 6 March 2019.

1. Introduction to ADA: The
Australian Data Archive
as a Trusted Repository
for Research Data
Dr. Steve McEachern, Director, Australian
Data Archive

2. Infrastructure considerations
• Data
• Metadata
• Access
– Access control
– Embargoes and restrictions
• Governance
– Licensing
– Ownership
– Roles and responsibilities

3. Useful frameworks
• FAIR data
– Findable
– Accessible
– Interoperable
– Reusable
• 5 Safes:
– Safe people
– Safe projects
– Safe settings
– Safe data
– Safe outputs

4. ADA in Brief
• The ADA was set up in 1981, with a mission to collect
and preserve Australian research data on behalf of the
social science research community
• The Archive holds over data from over 1500 datasets,
including national election studies; public opinion polls;
social attitudes surveys, major longitudinal studies,
censuses, aggregate statistics, administrative data and
selected international collections
• Covers social sciences, population health, business
and economics and humanities
• Data holdings are sourced from academic, government
and private sectors

5. ADA Dataverse
http://dataverse.ada.edu.au
• Redevelopment of our database and website infrastructure (completed
late 2018)
– New website
– New data catalogue (including DOIs for datasets)
– Open data access
– API access (both for deposit and access, e.g. through R)
• New functionality (in development):
– Self-deposit of data
– Behavioural trials registry
– ORCID and Shibboleth authentication
– Secure data facility
– Qualitative data archive

6. ADA Dataverse

7. Metadata and catalogue pages
Study information is based on the DDI-C (Data Documentation Initiative)
standard, and includes:
• Files
– Data files
– Related Materials: additional documentation (reports, questionnaires, technical
information), links and other related studies (eg. others in the series) that may
interest you
– Request forms
• Metadata
– Study: information including the investigators, abstract, sample, data collection
methods, and access requirements.
– Variables: a list of variables available in a quantitative dataset
• Terms
– Terms and conditions of use
– Restrictions
– …
• Versions
– Version control

8. Dataset landing page
8
Dataset
Dataset files
Explore the dataset (tabs)

9. Accessing data

10. Request access to data (1)
10
Select one or
more
Controlled
access
Open access

11. Request access to data (2)
11
You must be registered and
signed-in

12. Registration

13. Conditions of use
(Reusability)

14. Request access to data (3)
14

15. Business rules
• ADA approves “standard” requests, subject to
business rules (based on the contents of the user
request)
• ADA refers “non-standard” requests (e.g. from
commercial organisations) to owner for review
• ADA or owner reviews and approves/rejects non-
standard requests
• Approvals are managed in Dataverse
• Communications between users, ADA and owners
regarding requests is managed via email, and
logged in the ADA ticketing system
15

16. Email notification:
confirmation of access request
16

17. Interoperability
• A Demonstration in R
• See R command file

18. Reusability
• Licensing and Terms of use (Terms tab)
• Provenance provided (Metadata tab)
• Common standards

19. Questions?
Steven McEachern
steven.mceachern@anu.edu.au
ada@anu.edu.au
http://ada.edu.au