NCRIS Roadmap Review

Australia’s highly dispersed population makes the sharing of expensive research infrastructure a necessity. Such sharing not only makes economic sense – it also builds clusters of research excellence and creates new opportunities for cooperation between researchers. NCRIS is helping to build such cooperation, not only between public sector researchers but between all those involved in the research sector, including government agencies and the private sector. ATSE strongly supports efforts to build such cooperation.

Summary of ATSE’s Comments

ATSE:

• strongly supports the concept of NCRIS and believes that sharing research facilities and infrastructure not only makes good economic sense but also promotes cooperation between researchers.
• believes that the current balance of funding for university infrastructure between NCRIS and other sources is appropriate.
• urges NCRIS to take a lead in promoting best practice in the management of research facilities and infrastructure in Australia.
• considers that remote access to instrumentation, databanks and computing facilities is of increasing importance.
• sees value in locating NCRIS facilities in research precincts, subject to a commitment to genuine collaboration on the part of precinct researchers (and to develop potential commercial applications where applicable).
• notes that the Discussion Paper has included the needs of the Humanities and Social Sciences and urges NCRIS to examine the needs of other areas that are also not explicitly covered in the NRPs (for example, wireless sensor networks).
• sees a need for NCRIS investment in relation to mitigation of greenhouse gases, and energy production, storage, conversion, efficiency and so on (that is, more extensively than just low-emission large scale energy processes).
• has provided a number of other specific comments on the contributions of each of the Working Groups to the Discussion Paper as well as on aspects of the provision of information and communications technology (ICT) facilities and services.