Over the years the APO team has been remarkably stable, but it is inevitable that some people will leave while new people arrive – and with big new projects the APO team continues to grow, which is very exciting. The main team is based at Swinburne University of Technology, with collaborators based at partner universities and organisations including University of South Australia (UniSA), RMIT University, and the University of Melbourne.
Continue reading “APO team movements 2018”The staff and board of APO would like to thank all our readers, researchers, contributors, advertisers, Major Partners, Collection sponsors, collaborators and everyone else who has worked with APO in 2018.
We wish you all the best for the festive season and the New Year!
Every year at APO we prepare the Top 10 list of most viewed content across all major subject areas. View the full Top 10 list overall, or filter for the Top 10 in each of our 13 broad subject categories.
It always seems to be a big year for APO but this year we have really grown significantly thanks to a large ARC infrastructure grant, the support of our APO Major Partners and an increasing number of special projects and collaborations.
Technology is changing so rapidly, the database continues to grow, there are new ways of connecting and operating knowledge infrastructure, and more demands and expectations of services and functionality. Now more than ever APO needs to work with other systems and organisations to ensure we can thrive as a public knowledge service in such a dynamic and exciting environment.
Most people know that APO provides an excellent alert service, with daily, weekly and bi-monthly New Zealand Briefings updating readers on the latest research reports and papers. But APO is much more than this – we are also a publisher and open access repository of full text policy reports, papers and data, organised and available for the long term. Both services are essential if we are to have productive and democratic access to quality research and information on public interest issues.
Continue reading “APO 2018 wrap up”
APO’s research and Feature Collections act as knowledge hubs for key publications, data sets and other resources, bringing together both new materials and building up an archive that can be searched and analysed.
With our extensive database of research we can quickly pull together the key research on a particular issue from the APO archive as well as seeking out essential resources to add to the collection. In 2018 we have continued to grow our Special Collections supported by Major Partners, Australian Research Council (ARC) project partners and a range of other organisations.
Continue reading “New APO Feature Collections 2018”A new collaboration between RAI and APO will secure access to regional research and policy resources into the future.
In November 2017, [In]Form RAI’s online library of regional research moved to APO. Since 2012, RAI has gathered over 2500 resources in the [In]Form library. [In]Form has grown into a valuable tool for government, academics and regional communities and has helped to guide RAI’s policy agenda.
Moving to APO will enrich APO’s regional content and allow it to grow into the future. APO is updated daily, moderated by editors and features user-friendly search and browsing. It is used by an extensive audience of policy makers, practitioners and researchers.
Since 2016, APO has employed a Regional Development Editor, based at RMIT University, who specialises in regional resources.
APO and RAI are confident this collaboration will allow us to continue to share knowledge, ideas and practical solutions to improve prosperity in regional Australia.
All [In]Form content will be available at http://apo.org.au/collections/regional-development/
It will continue to be available at http://inform.regionalaustralia.org.au/ for a certain period but will not be updated.
To explore APO’s features or sign up to daily or weekly newsletters, visit http://apo.org.au
After a long project we are very pleased to say that APO as a database as well as all of the datasets we host are now able to be searched and accessed via Research Data Australia.
And we have a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for APO so if you want to cite APO as a whole – if you are perhaps writing about the importance of open access databases as a source of evidence for public policy or that you used APO overall for a project – please include doi.org/10.4225/50/5b15c09dbc286 in your reference as it will help us to to trace this more easily.
Research Data Australia is a project of the Australian National Data Service which helps researchers find, access, and reuse data from over one hundred Australian research organisations, government agencies, and cultural institutions. It does not store the data itself but provides descriptions of, and links to, the data from their data publishing partners such as APO. Research Data Australia caters specifically for researchers but also has broader relevance to others including policy makers, educators and business people. Continue reading “APO data live in Research Data Australia”
APO has received a $1.4m grant from the Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities (LIEF) program to fund the Linked Semantic Platforms (LSP) project over 2018 and 2019. Together with contributions from partner organisations the project has an overall budget of around $2m over two years.
By using linked open data, knowledge graphs and collaborations across existing research infrastructure projects, the collaborative project aims to develop the next generation of decision-support tools for interdisciplinary research on critical public policy issues.
Expected outcomes include inter-operability across major social science databases and new analytical tools that will transform the research capabilities for evidence-based policy making.
Outcomes are expected on a number of different areas, including sustainable built environments and transport in urban and regional communities, social care and health in the community, work and wellbeing, digital inclusion and digital health. Continue reading “APO project brings $2m boost to connected platforms for public policy”
While copyright reform moves at a glacial pace, it is pleasing to report that in 2017 the Australian Government introduced important changes to copyright law in the form of the Copyright Amendment (Disability Access and Other Measures) Act 2017 which came into force on Friday 22 December. The changes it brings about are the most significant to Australian copyright law in over a decade, according to the Australian Digital Alliance (ADA). The ADA report states that the Amendment:
‘…ends the antiquated concept of perpetual copyright for unpublished works, instead applying the same basic terms to all materials, regardless of whether they are published or not. It also applies flat terms to orphan works whose authors cannot be identified 70 years from when they were created or made public (this fact sheet on the changes from the Australian Libraries Copyright Committee explains what all this means).
When these laws come into effect on 1 January 2019 they will apply to all works currently protected by copyright in Australia. This means that literally millions of old unpublished works from our national collections will enter the public domain all at once, including recipes used by Captain Cook, letters written by Jane Austen and endless ephemera. Every year after that, unpublished works whose authors died 70 years earlier will also fall into the public domain, and orphan works created/made public 70 years earlier.’
