ARDC — Australian Research Data Commons

Overview

The Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) is Australia’s national FAIR data infrastructure, funded through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) and hosted by the Australian Access Federation. Established in its current form in 2018 through the merger of ANDS, Nectar, and RDS, ARDC provides services, training, infrastructure, and policy coordination for FAIR data sharing across all Australian research disciplines. Its role is broadly analogous to EOSC in the European context: coordinating national data infrastructure, aligning Australian practice with international FAIR standards, and connecting Australian researchers and repositories to global data ecosystems.

Key Activities

ARDC funds and coordinates the Australian Research Data Infrastructure (ARDI) programme, which supports domain-specific data infrastructure projects across universities and research institutes. It provides the Research Vocabularies Australia service for publishing and discovering controlled vocabularies, the Australian Research Data Registry for nationally coordinated metadata, and the Nectar Research Cloud for compute and data storage. ARDC aligns with RDA principles and actively contributes to international FAIR data governance through Working Group participation and bilateral agreements with comparable infrastructures in Europe and North America.

Connections

• relatedTo: RDA (ARDC participates in RDA plenaries and contributes to Working Groups on FAIR data governance)
• relatedTo: EOSC (bilateral alignment between Australian and European national data commons frameworks)
• relatedTo: FAIR Principles (ARDC operationalises FAIR principles as the foundation of its national infrastructure strategy)

Resources

• https://ardc.edu.au
• https://ardc.edu.au/collaborations/ (ARDC international collaborations)
• https://ardc.edu.au/services/ (ARDC service catalogue)