About GUARDIANS

“User-centric design must lie at the heart of Australia's NDRI system.”

National Digital Research Infrastructure Strategy

Australia's human genomics research datasets present unparalleled opportunities to enhance our understanding of health, disease mechanisms, and precision medicine. However, data fragmentation, access barriers, and governance complexity limit their use. GUARDIANS is addressing these challenges by developing standardised interfaces, harmonised data formats, ethical access rules, and interoperable institutional policies and technologies. Delivering these vital components will enable researchers to discover, access, and analyse critical data from multiple research datasets, unlocking opportunities for discovery.

GUARDIANS aligns with international standards, including those of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH), while addressing Australia's specific ethical, legal, and social context. Inspired by the NCRIS Roadmap and NAGIM Implementation Recommendations, the program builds on previous initiatives such as the Human Genomes Platform Project, and follows an iterative implementation model to ensure practical, scalable outcomes.

Australian BioCommons coordinates the program in partnership with Australia’s national human omics research and research infrastructure community. Delivery is shared across program partners bringing capability in trusted researcher identity, computational infrastructure, data access management, software engineering and systems design, cloud engineering, data repositories and commons, and ethical, legal, and governance expertise.

GUARDIANS is led by Australian BioCommons and delivered with in-kind support from program partners. Australian BioCommons and the GUARDIANS program are supported by Bioplatforms Australia. Bioplatforms Australia is enabled by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS).