DSTG is improving its Digital Research Infrastructure to better support the innovation, science and technology demands of the Defence Strategic Review. Part of this work has identified the key role Custom Digital Research Environments (CDREs) will play in harnessing the potential of Australia’s national research ecosystem to deliver impact to Defence.

We seek to engage consultants to examine the need for CDREs within DSTG, and their partners in the Defence Research ecosystem, then assess current use and uptake of CDREs within Australia. We expect the outcome to present an insightful view of the CDREs required to enable Defence research, and identification of successful, proven elements/approaches that could be incorporated into a proposal for a National Defence Research Cloud.

This task includes: 

1. Close engagement with 5 leading DSTG research projects and their research partners, seeking to understand and identify:

• Key research objectives
• Digital science methodologies employed
• Gaps in current digital research infrastructure that are impeding achievement of research outcomes
• Examples of CDRE features or functions that would better enable achievement of research outcomes

2. Identifying ways to measure the success of a CDRE including

• Cost of onboarding (including investment of researcher time in training)
• Cross-disciplinary/cross-institutional uptake by researchers
• Impact on researcher productivity
• Engagement with industry
• Support for seamless research translation

3. Identifying 5 Australian CDREs for further investigation

4. Engagement with the CDREs, comprising review of available materials and interviews with key players

• Understand funding models and sources including co-investment
• Best practice models to enable industry participation

            -Including balancing commercial IP management needs

• Best practice models for researcher engagement
• Best practice models when providing large quantities of CDREs to balance unique research needs vs the cost and effort of providing unique CDREs

5. Engagement with a sample of high impact users of CDREs

• Understand drivers for uptake
• Contribution to research outcomes and impact

6. Assessing the CDREs against the success measures

7. Recommending elements and approaches of CDREs that could be incorporated into proposals for a National Defence Research Cloud