Portage: Supporting Canadian innovation through shared expertise and stewardship of research data

Abstract

The billions of dollars that are invested every year in research generate vast and diverse amounts of research data. Sound research data management (RDM) practices, with due respect for confidentiality and intellectual property, accelerates scientific progress by allowing researchers to access and re-use others' data for their own scientific purposes, thereby adding value to those data and speeding up the rate of new discoveries. The paper will describe Canada’s Portage project to develop a coordinated, library-based national research data network. Led by the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL), in collaboration with regional academic library associations and other important national infrastructure organizations, Portage has two major components: • A library-based network of expertise for research data management; and • A project that connects the various infrastructure and service components into a national preservation and discovery network for research data that will evolve and expand over time. Plans for preservation services include a technical infrastructure consisting of software that supports the entire research data lifecycle (ingest, preservation, discovery, access, repurposing), data replication services, and networked data storage. This infrastructure will be highly distributed with local, regional and central nodes and will also be based on standards to ensure interoperability. Close collaboration with other partners and stakeholders, including organizations providing high-capacity compute and storage resources and the national high-speed network, will be essential for the development and ongoing maintenance of this infrastructure.