DEST Announces Australian Government to Invest $19.4 Million to Fund Nine Projects Under the Systemic Infrastructure Initiative (SII). (August 23, 2005)

     Within the Government's first Backing Australia’s Ability, 2001-2006 programme the Systemic Infrastructure Initiative (SII) was promulgated. Its stated aim is to upgrade research infrastructure at Australia's universities and to that end provide $246 million over five years. However, DEST in its "2005 Call for Proposals" appears to restrict what the funds can be used for, "The SII is funding projects which will help promote Australian research output and build Australian research information infrastructure through the development of distributed digital repositories and common technical services that manage access and authorisation."

Appointed by the Minister for Education, Science and Training, Brendan Nelson, the Australian Research Information Infrastructure Committee (ARIIC) was specifically tasked with advising the Government on the best ways:

• to improve the access of Australian researchers to the information they need to carry out their research

• to make the results of Australian research widely available and easily accessible.

To that end, in 2003 the SII funded four projects known collectively as the FRODO Projects:

• Meta Access Management System Project (MAMS) Lead Institution - Macquarie University http://www.melcoe.mq.edu.au/projects/MAMS/ 

• The Australian Research Repositories Online to the World (ARROW) Lead Institution -Monash University http://arrow.edu.au/ 

• Australian Digital Theses Program Expansion (ADT) Lead Institution - University of New South Wales http://adt.caul.edu.au/adtariic.html 

• Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR) Lead Institution - Australian National University http://www.apsr.edu.au

Total funding for the four projects is $12 million.

In May 2005, the Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST), called for proposals on behalf of ARIIC to further the discovery, creation, management and dissemination of Australian e-research information in an integrated digital environment. The call sought proposals which provided national, sustainable, innovative and flexible solutions to one or more of the following:

• Maximising access to digital resources in Australian universities, especially regional universities

• Creating new types of digital libraries to manage extremely large data sets.

• Adopting a national approach to improving open access to the results of publicly funded research

• Providing effective linkages between sets of research information to enable seamless access by researchers.

Twenty proposals were received by DEST of which the following nine were successful for a total funding allocation of $19.4 million:

• Time Sync: Mapping the Global Financial System Lead Institution- University of New South Wales

•  BlueNet: The Australian Marine Science Data Network Lead Institution - University of Tasmania

• Molecular Medicine Informatics Model: A Multi-Institutional, Multi-disciplinary Research and Training Platform for Clinical Research (MMIM) Lead Institution – University of Melbourne

• Australian Service for Knowledge of Open Source Software (ASK-OSS) Lead Institution – Macquarie University

• Middleware Action Plan and Strategy (MAPS) Lead Institution – University of Queensland

• Legal Protocols for Copyright Management: Facilitating Open Access to Research at the National and International Levels Lead Institution – Queensland University of Technology

• Dataset Acquisition, Accessibility and Annotation e-Research Technology Project (DART) Lead Institution – Monash University

• E – Security Framework for Research Lead Institution – University of Queensland

• Regional Universities Building Research Infrastructure Collaboratively (RUBRIC) Lead Institution – University of Southern Queensland

Thumbnail descriptions of these nine projects are available from DEST in MS-Word format.

At present it is unclear what allocations have been made or proposed for the remaining $214.6 million that have been earmarked for SII from Backing Australia's Ability (2001-2006).