Governance and Operation

Who operates AusMT, how to reach them, and where responsibility for the data sits. The portal's About page carries the same content in shorter form.

Who runs AusMT

AusMT is an AuScope funded initiative, operated with the Australian MT community, as a pre-institutional deployment of the AusMT framework. The intended long-term home is AuScope/NCI institutional infrastructure; the framework, catalogue and survey packages are designed to transfer there without rework.

Publication decisions rest with the curator(s), who review each submission's metadata, licensing, access level and validation results before anything is published; see Review.

Contact, corrections, and takedown

Contact: ben@auscope.org.au

  • Questions and correction requests are acknowledged within five business days.
  • Takedown requests for contested data are actioned as a priority: the affected data is withheld from distribution while the matter is resolved with the originating custodian. Discovery metadata may remain visible with a note, or be withdrawn, at the custodian's request.
  • Custodians may request changes to their surveys' access level (open, metadata-only, embargoed) at any time; access levels are machine-enforced by the build (see Publication).

Data responsibility

Survey data remains the property and responsibility of its originating custodians under their stated licence:

  • AusMT redistributes transfer-function files only where the survey's licence is on the recognised redistributable list and its access level is open with no active embargo; otherwise the survey is listed as metadata with a pointer to the source archive.
  • Responsibility for the scientific accuracy of contributed data rests with the originating custodian. AusMT records and preserves provenance (original bytes, checksums, processing metadata) and does not alter scientific content.
  • Contributor contact details are never published in portal data products.

Succession

  • The framework is open source (Apache-2.0), with the design and security decisions behind each subsystem recorded in the repository beside the code.
  • The catalogue and all served packages are rebuildable from the survey source repository by any operator with one documented command.
  • Survey packages are plain files (EDI plus survey.yaml) under version control; heavyweight artifacts are designed to live on institutional storage (NCI THREDDS) referenced by pointer.

Status of this arrangement

This is a pre-institutional operating arrangement. The framework code is public and the portal's public reader is served at https://ausmt.auscope.org.au, including the machine-readable products under /data/. The curator and administrative surfaces are not exposed there, and the survey-data repository is private because it holds embargoed material. Before full public operation, AusMT is intended to move to an organisational repository home with at least two maintainers, a tagged and DOI'd release, and formal data-contribution agreements with custodian agencies.