Mission

  • To sustain strategic leadership in the provision and use of bioinformatics and bioscience data infrastructures at a national scale

  • To actively support life science research communities with community scale digital infrastructure developed and maintained in concert with international peer infrastructures

  • To provide access to services that:

    • Provide sophisticated analysis capabilities, including software and hardware platforms that underpin world class science

    • Support digital asset stewardship and management, retention, integration and publication solutions as they evolve

    • Enable researchers to observe best-practice data standards, management, interoperability and publication approaches as they evolve

  • To provide enduring access to the digital techniques, data and tools, that are needed by world class environmental, agricultural and biomedical research.

  • To provide training and support solutions that enable the rapid and broad based adoption of the above

Principles

  • Observe a national focus on capabilities and communities

  • Partner internationally: participate in and contribute to larger critical mass efforts where possible; reuse and improve rather than build anew

  • Build a software and expertise capability that will reduce duplication of infrastructure management in Australia and allow efforts to be re-focussed on methods development and dissemination

  • Promote the development of, and build on, high throughput cloud infrastructure that is interoperable with international (initially US and European) equivalents, using established, well supported software platforms

  • Streamline the exchange of tools, workflows, data and training and expertise both nationally and internationally


Strategy

Context

Digital technologies are proving transformational for the life sciences.

The Australian BioCommons is an ambitious new digital infrastructure capability that is enhancing Australian research in its ability to understand the molecular basis of life across environmental, agricultural and biomedical science. 

This large-scale investment in digital infrastructure is ensuring Australian life science research remains globally competitive, providing access to the tools, methods and training researchers require to respond to national challenges such as food security, environmental conservation and disease treatments.

The BioCommons is informing the development of a new capability for the estimated 30,000 publicly funded bioscience researchers in Australia, and investigating and providing recommendations for the services and tools that are needed to make sense of data on subjects such as DNA sequencing, proteomic and metabolic analysis at scale.

The first phase of the BioCommons is actively engaging the Australian bioscience community to deliver:

  • An operating infrastructure providing a core set of bioinformatics services

  • A set of research activities and associated communities providing exemplars for others to follow

  • A consortium of participants providing guidance and implementation support

  • A strategic plan for the BioCommons

  • A five year operational plan for the delivery of the Commons (through to 2023)