Systemic Infrastructure Initiative


The Systemic Infrastructure Initiative was announced by the Government of Australia in January 2001 as part of Backing Australia's Ability – An Innovation Action Plan for the Future.
The Government announced that $246 million would be allocated over five years "to upgrade the basic infrastructure of universities, such as scientific and research equipment, libraries and laboratory facilities" to support research and research training.
Those eligible to apply are restricted to universities and other higher education institutions specified in Table A of the Higher Education Support Act 2003, Bond University and the University of Notre Dame Australia.

Early committees

In 2002, as part of the SII funding, the Minister committed $250,000 to two committees, the Higher Education Information Infrastructure Implementation Steering Committee and Higher Education Bandwidth Advisory Committee. These committees were to formulae further broad projects to be considered for SII funding in the following year.
The was completed in November 2002.

Australian Research Information Infrastructure Committee

As part of SII the Minister for Education, Science and Training, Dr Brendan Nelson, MP established the Australian Research Information Infrastructure Committee in August 2003 to advise the Government on the information infrastructure requirements.

2002 round

Over the course of the SSI program, many improvements to the national backbone were funded:
In 2003, ARIIC funded four Federated Repositories of Online Digital Objects projects :
On 22 August 2005 the Hon Dr Brendan Nelson announced funding for nine projects collectively known as the Managed Environments for Research Repository Infrastructure projects, involving over 30 Australian universities. The funded projects are: