The John de Laeter Centre for Isotope Research (JDLC), headquartered at Curtin University, is a Perth-based multi-institutional research infrastructure centre providing the academic, resources and environmental research sector with advanced analytical facilities and expertise. This video explores the reasons why open data is critical to the mineral and mining industry. The Centre has commissioned a number of new instruments generating data relating to digital mineralogy and materials characterisation for pure and applied research. The new mineral analyser TESCAN TIMA instrument will be used on up to 2,000 samples from the Geological Survey of Western Australia (GSWA), characterising the mineralogy of the samples into searchable digital mineralogical and geochemical datasets. This ANDS project has created an appropriate metadata schema for these datasets, captured and enhanced the metadata for a 150 sample subset of the collection under that schema and make that metadata available to Research Data Australia and the AuScope portal to facilitate discovery and access to the datasets by the international research community.