Governance
Contents
Governance¶
Scope of the collection¶
The scope of the Australian Community Reference Climate Data Collection is to host replicas of climate datasets that are of interest to the Australian climate research community. We hope that this will save people time and reduce dataset duplication.
The datasets currently included in the collection are listed in the sidebar along with our working list of potential future datasets. The initial collection was compiled by a group of data managers based on current dataset usage by the climate community and the expected needs of the ACS project. We sought ACS and wider community input via a survey and reviewed the initial list based on the results. This initial list might change in the future based on user requests and changes to project priorities. To make the management of both the datasets themselves and our storage allocation on NCI viable and transparent we have some criteria to determine which datasets to add/remove from the collection.
Criteria to accept a new dataset¶
The primary criteria is that a dataset should be useful to the ACS project, as this is the project that provides the storage. However, to avoid unnecessary duplication of data on the NCI servers and to facilitate user experience, exceptions to this rule are allowed where:
other partners require a different version or extra variables from datasets already hosted in this collection
datasets are grouped in sub-collections (e.g. if most precipitation datasets are already part of this collection then it is reasonable to add new ones)
datasets that are likely to be of use to the ACS researchers in the future if not immediately, provided storage and demands on staff time to manage it are reasonable
In case of doubt the collection managers will be consulted and decide on a new dataset suitability. Any dataset request that requires a large amount of storage and/or a considerable staff time and effort to manage should be evaluated regardless of the origin of the request.
Contributions¶
This is a community-managed collection. We do not expect users to contribute directly but we would like support from their institutions/projects by providing in-kind time from one of their data managers to help maintaining this resource in the longer term.
Open access¶
Anyone who has access to NCI can request access to the data, provided they agree with any terms of use.
Handling of licensing¶
For specific licensing terms, which will be different for each dataset, the onus is on the user to respect the terms of use and register for any dataset that requires to do so. We will endeavour to make the license available both in the metadata records and in the dataset folders and repository, so it is visible whichever way the dataset is discovered. We cannot however enforce the licenses and adherence to terms and conditions. We can only share datasets whose license allows us to do so. In any other case we will seek an agreement to be able to redistribute the data locally.
Provenance¶
We use the aus-ref-clim-data-nci GitHub Organisation to host all codes used to download the data (including these jupyter book materials). There will be a repository for each dataset. Each repository will contain wherever possible and relevant, information on the dataset itself, the code used to download it and any information useful to cite and ackowdledge the dataset. This is also where issues and updates can be tracked and users can request clairifcations or imporvements to the data and its documentation. More details are given in the “How to” section.