December 2020 National eResearch Newsletter

Following the launch of the Women in HPC Australasia chapter in October, the community has continued to grow.

The final meeting of the year will be on Wednesday the 16th of December at 2:30PM AEST.  All welcome, please join us for some end of year chats with colleagues across countries, facilities, roles and time zones!

Meeting registration is at https://anu.zoom.us/meeting/register/u5ckdO-qpjgqAkRN3i24ElrWKInFB6UX_w.

Please provide feedback on the Australian BioCommons’ Microbiome Analysis Infrastructure Roadmap (see https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jbEAa83CKoPyonx3cFcSWUreNzQGreoVuBtdA8AW6Rs/edit?usp=sharing).  We welcome comment and feedback from all practitioners and interested parties of microbiome analysis (inclusive of targeted amplicon sequencing and shotgun metagenomic sequencing) in Australia.  Feedback can be submitted either directly as comments into the linked google doc or via email back to Tiffanie Nelson tiff@biocommons.org.au up until 18 January 2021.

Forward this to any Australian researcher or interested party undertaking microbiome analysis.  If you would like be keep up to date on activities related to this community including Roadmap updates, join our Google Group at https://groups.google.com/a/biocommons.org.au/g/metagenomics.

Do you currently analyse and model ecological data?  Would you like to spend less time wrangling data and configuring models and spend more time collaborating and doing the science?

EcoCommons wants your input to its ‘Data and Modelling in Science survey’ at https://prodsurvey.rcs.griffith.edu.au/ecocommonsusers20.  Have a chance to win a $250 Visa Gift Card!

Over the next three years, EcoCommons will be working to build trusted, world-leading ecological and environmental modelling tools, which will become the platform of choice for Australian practitioners and researchers to analyse and model ecological data.

Read more at https://ecocommons.org.au or on the fact sheet (https://ecocommons.org.au/documents/EcoCommons Fact Sheet_Nov20.pdf).

The next annual NZ eResearch Conference (online and face-face) will take place in Wellington from 10 – 12 Feb, 2021.

Early bird registration closes 11 Jan.

The in-person and online conference features a theme of Level UP, focusing on the increasing speed, agility, scale, and collaboration required in research today, which is even more important with COVID-19’s global impact on research.

Read more and register at https://www.eresearchnz2021.org.nz/.

The Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) investment of $17.13 million into digital research infrastructure, with co-investment $23.84 million from collaborating organisations, ensures the research community will continue to strengthen Australia’s health outlook, economy and environment.

For ARDC Public Sector Bridges 2020, see https://ardc.edu.au/news/improving-access-to-public-sector-data-strengthens-australian-research/.

For ARDC Platforms 2020, see https://ardc.edu.au/news/new-data-projects-will-help-transform-australian-research/.

For ARDC Australian Data Partnerships 2020, see https://ardc.edu.au/news/new-data-partnerships-will-boost-national-cutting-edge-research/.

Sharing your data to ensure provenance and promote re-use and citation—in other words, making it FAIR—just became a whole lot easier with the launch of a new, streamlined ISO compliant version of our data submission tool, SHaRED.

See https://www.tern.org.au/news-publishdatawithtern/.

Need to quickly map sites and graph things like fractional vegetation cover or relative cover of plant growth forms for multiple plots?  These are all possible with the new and updated version of TERN’s ausplotsR package, which also provides free and instant access to a decade of soil and vegetation data collected at over 780 environmental monitoring sites across Australia.

See https://www.tern.org.au/news-new-ausplotsr/.

Slides from Tech Talk 2020/2 are available – Serverless Web Applications:  See https://sites.google.com/ardc.edu.au/techtalk2020/talks (where information and recordings from earlier Tech Talks can be seen).  Video coming soon.

Please Suggest topics and Vote on upcoming Tech Talk topics at https://poll.ly/#/LyD09l7d.

The NISO Plus 2021 Conference (National Information Standards Organization) will be held virtually from 22-25 February, 2021.

Entitled “Global Conversations :: Global Connections” it will be a place where publishers, vendors, librarians, archivists, product managers, metadata specialists, electronic resource managers, and much more come together to both solve existing problems and more importantly have conversations that prevent future problems from ever occurring.

See https://niso.plus/.

The final touches are being put on the preliminary programme of eResearch NZ 2021 so that a sneak peek can be unveiled this week!  Co-hosted by New Zealand eScience Infrastructure (NeSI), REANNZ, and Genomics Aotearoa, we’ll be gathering research communities in person and online from 10-12 February 2021.  Thank you to everyone who submitted presentations – we’ve got submissions from across New Zealand and Australia showcasing how research communities used 2020 to #LevelUP.

More information:  https://www.eresearchnz2021.org.nz/.

More than 100,000 people in the research and education community have used AARNet’s CloudStor service since it launched in 2014.  Over the years CloudStor has evolved from a large file transfer solution to the high performing and easy-to-use collaboration workspace it is today.

Co-developed with the community, CloudStor now offers a growing range of integrated tools for sharing and analysing data.  Watch this video to find out why neuroscientist and Macquarie University Research Fellow Robert Luke loves CloudStor:  https://youtu.be/GIOKUxbDdvY.

The Digital Curation Centre in collaboration with Jisc and STFC-UKRI will be hosting RDA’s 17th Plenary meeting on 20-22 April 2021, either as a hybrid event, or as a virtual event.

The Call for Sessions is now open and closes on 12 January 2021, 23:59 UTC.

The Call for Co-located events is now open and closes on 12 February 2021.

You can find more information about the Plenary on the RDA Web site at https://www.rd-alliance.org/plenaries/rda-17th-plenary-meeting-edinburgh-hybrid.

Presentations from the 2020 New Zealand Research Software Engineering (NZ RSE) Conference are now available to view on Figshare.  The conference, hosted by New Zealand eScience Infrastructure (NeSI), featured 34 speakers and 181 registrants from six different countries (New Zealand, Australia, United States, France, China, Pakistan).  To learn more about ongoing initiatives to build the RSE communities in both New Zealand and Australia, visit the RSE-AUNZ website at https://rse-aunz.github.io/.

More information at: https://figshare.com/collections/New_Zealand_Research_Software_Engineering_Conference_2020/5172023.

AARNet has recently been collaborating with members of the research community to develop a proof of concept for a Sensitive Data service designed to meet their unique needs.  The project arose in response to the demand from AARNet customers for a secure and sustainable long-term cloud environment located in Australia where sensitive research data can be collected, stored and analysed.

The proof of concept was shared with the eResearch community at the eRA20 conference in October and moves into pilot phase in early 2021 with an initial three institutions on board.

More information or to express interest in participating, contact Frankie.Stevens@aarnet.edu.au.

Federation University Australia’s Centre for eResearch and Digital Innovation (CeRDI) and Zoos Victoria have again teamed up to track the annual migration of the Bogong Moth to Victoria’s high country.  The moth is an important food source for the endangered Mountain Pygmy-possum.  Members of the public are encouraged to record sightings of the moth and to load photos and locational information into the Moth Tracker web app.  This citizen science will help inform the impact of food scarcity on the declining possum numbers.

The Moth Tracker web app is available through the State Wide Integrated Flora and Fauna Teams (SWIFFT) website:  www.swifft.net.au/mothtracker.

A veritable time capsule of detailed climate data is now available to Australian climate researchers.  ERA5 has been recognised as a significant reference dataset, and it has been eagerly anticipated by Australian climate researchers.  To unlock its full potential for climate research, ERA5 requires local access that is readily accessible for high-performance computing and data analysis systems.  With supercomputing infrastructure and robust data services, NCI is the ideal location for Australian researchers to collaborate and analyse the ERA5 data.

Read more at:  https://nci.org.au/news-events/news/decades-climate-data-transform-australian-research.

NCI and Pawsey are Australia’s two Tier-1 HPC and HPD centres.  For the 2020 Supercomputing Conference, the centres released an update on some of the key activities and successes of the year.  The overview helped introduce the centres to an international audience, and provide a list of some of the remarkable achievements of this difficult year.

Read more at:  https://nci.org.au/news-events/news/national-centres-support-critical-research-next-generation-supercomputers.

Keep an eye on the NCI website for updates to the ongoing Humans of NCI profiles!  Recent updates include Dr Colette Kerry, a researcher in physical oceanography with a lifelong love of the ocean, and Ms Annelisa Stella Rigoni, a PhD student in computational chemistry who has been interested in tiny things ever since she got her first toy microscope at age 6.

Read more at:  https://nci.org.au/research/humans.

The ARDC welcomes a new $8.9 million investment to help provide humanities, arts, social science and Indigenous researchers with easier access to data, analysis and sharing based on FAIR principles.  Read more here:  https://ardc.edu.au/news/new-investments-in-hass-and-indigenous-research/.

ARDC will be engaging with key community stakeholders to define structural governance and operational parameters in the coming months.

Please register if you are interested in being part of the consultations, here:  https://ardc.edu.au/collaborations/strategic-activities/hass-and-indigenous-research-data-commons/.

AeRO provides details of the latest eResearch job opportunities in the sector.  Jobs are posted immediately to https://twitter.com/AeRO_eResearch, and the website at http://aero.edu.au/jobs/ is also updated.

This is a free service for the whole eResearch community – to advertise a position, simply email loretta@aero.edu.au.

Here are some current vacancies:  Communications and outreach manager, eResearch Software Specialist, Operations Analyst, IS Research Support Officer.