Eligibility

ABLeS is available to research groups and bioinformatics communities across Australia.

Participants who wish to use ABLeS must ensure their projects align with ABLeS principles.

Principles of ABLeS projects

ABLeS projects broadly align with the following three principles:

1. Projects are life science related and contribute to producing and sharing data, research, or software-based outcomes.

2. Project participants must have the necessary expertise to drive and execute the bioinformatics goals of their work.

3. Projects must plan and utilize ABLeS resources responsibly, recognizing their status as finite and consumable.

More details are provided in the table below:

Principle	Characteristics	Project Type
		Reference Data	Production Bioinformatics	Software Accelerator
Data centric outcomes	Production of reference and derived data assets that will be published to enable use / reuse by others outside the group.	✓	✓
Research centric outcomes	Production of data assets and outputs that are critical to research projects and consortia making use of best practice, production level bioinformatics approaches.		✓
Software centric outcomes	Creation, development, installation, testing and/or optimisation of software that will be made available for use / reuse by others in the life sciences community.			✓
Common research theme	A defined cross-institutional collaboration, project, community, consortium, or some other collaborative construct, that is focused on a common research theme.	✓
Development & optimisation	Groups work to understand their software, methods and the optimal approaches to solving the bioinformatics problems at hand. ABLeS will facilitate both the experimental / testing and production phases of computational analyses.	✓
Planned usage of ABLeS resources	The use of ABLeS resources is planned and approached with a level of care appropriate to their status as limited and consumable resources.	✓
Sharing	Appropriate mechanisms are used to share outputs that support and assist other groups, with examples provided in the ABLeS publication. Outputs include software, methods, training, resource usage and quality assessments for derived reference data sets, submissions to data international repositories and research publications.	✓

ABLeS expectations

Principle	Description
Project leadership	A project lead is responsible for all use of resources provided, which will need to adhere to relevant facility processes and policies. The lead will also monitor and manage reasonable usage of their project computational infrastructure allocations.
Group-level decision making	A collaborative decision making mechanism to prioritise the bioinformatics work using relevant computational resources must exist. This can be a formalised steering committee, a working group, or some other forum which is representative of the collaboration. Resources used must be agreed upon / in line with the community’s decision making mechanism and align with community priorities.
Group-level expertise	The community has expertise which will drive and execute its bioinformatics agenda. This expertise offers a strong collaboration link with the expertise and support available through ABLeS, NCI and Pawsey.
Collaboration & consultation	ABLeS is collaborative and involves BioCommons, the research community, and the computational facilities. It is also a standing item for discussion and forums play a strong role in managing the use of ABLeS: groups will thus engage with BioCommons in an open and collaborative manner, with regular meetups.
Follow compute facility access policies	All users must abide by the relevant access policies of Pawsey and NCI. NCI Terms and Conditions of Access; NCI Data Collections Management; and Pawsey Conditions of Access.
Time frame / duration of allocations	Each project is reviewed at the 6 month mark, to ensure resources are being used as efficiently as practical and so challenges can be identified / addressed by the ABLeS team. Reference data and production projects are ongoing by definition, while software accelerator projects need to be renewed at 6 months if the work originally described for the project has not been completed.