 iMAS is a research institute of the University of Tasmania. We collect data from around the world, but in particular in temperate Australia and in the Southern Ocean and high latitudes right through to Antarctica. What really distinguishes iMAS data is the amount of it because there are so many scientists and research students working on data collection and its scope right across pretty much every aspect of marine science. We're essentially wanting to establish three portals for data so that they'll be taken up and used by other scientists. All of these data from all three portals actually exist on the same network, the Australian Ocean Data Network. Collecting large-scale oceanographic data is particularly expensive and particularly challenging. So having the data there, having them discoverable and accessible and in a form that makes them interoperable across different data types really means that we're gaining the most from the investment of collecting those data. The first one is the iMAS portal for iMAS itself. There's a lot of data collected here, so it's really important that those data are made available for reuse, that they're managed and curated properly. Reef Life Survey provides a really wonderful way to see about space-time variation on reefs around the world. There are now data available from actually thousands of sites right around the world in tropical and temperate areas. The research questions there are really important ones about how global change and multiple stresses are really impacting reefs worldwide. There's already been some very high-impact work come from that data and the data set was quite extraordinary in showing that some marine-protected areas work very well and others really don't perform at all in terms of what is being asked of them. The third one is an international effort we're calling Temperate Reef Base and it's basically a repository for any data from temperate reefs worldwide. Now the first data to go into this is a data collected on kelp beds. The big question that we're trying to address there is how kelp beds are responding to disturbance in the face of climate change and other kinds of anthropogenic stresses. Again, kelp beds are just so fundamentally important in terms of their production, in terms of biodiversity, the kinds of fisheries they support and yet we're seeing kelp beds change on a global scale. Many of the challenges that modern society face are large and complex ones and therefore by their very nature interdisciplinary. So having large data sets that are available that can be brought together in an interdisciplinary framework can help solve some of these problems in a way that wouldn't otherwise be possible. Open data is important for a number of reasons. First of all, most of it is publicly funded and if it's publicly funded it should be publicly available. But the other thing is that data are always being used other than for the purpose which they were collected initially. We simply can't imagine how important data will be for particular questions or how they might be used in all sorts of creative ways into the future. In a more immediate sense we have a range of stakeholders across all sorts of industries from fishing to oil and gas, marine transport, industry, aquaculture. So much of our economy depends on marine systems and most of us live near the coastline. So that data is just really critical to us doing the right thing and making the right decisions around marine systems into the future. The motivation for this project was that we recognised three distinctly different but really important data collections and that if we were able to bring them together and brand them in the right way that their use and reuse would be accelerated and that they would really help to engender a culture of data sharing and open data.