Managing the Safe Data Access Professionals Network
Posted: Thu Feb 06, 2025 8:53 am
In the rest of this post, we highlight some recent innovations at UKDS SecureLab, demonstrating just how far we’ve come and how we continue to forge new possibilities across the data landscape.
The Safe Data Access Professionals (SDAP) Network was established a brazil rcs data decade ago, and includes members from a great many UK-based institutions working with controlled level data, such as the ONS, HMRC DataLab, Cancer Research UK, and The Health Foundation, amongst others. The purpose of SDAP is ‘to facilitate sharing of expertise, best practice and knowledge between organisations engaged in providing secure access to confidential sources of data from the health and social science research sector’.
The Network is now managed by SecureLab staff from the UK Data Service – a move voted for by SDAP members, which reflects the esteem in which UKDS SecureLab is held in the controlled data access field.
You can read more about the group by checking out the SDAP website and the blog post James and Chris wrote a few years ago.
#CiteTheData: leading on best practice for data citation
In 2019, we introduced compulsory data citation as one of the minimum requirements for output requests. In effect, this means that even if an output requested from UKDS SecureLab is fine from a Statistical Disclosure Control (SDC) perspective, if it does not include the full data citation – including the digital object identifier (doi) – it will not be released. This is now best practice across TREs and the proper citation of data benefits all the stakeholders in the research community.
The Safe Data Access Professionals (SDAP) Network was established a brazil rcs data decade ago, and includes members from a great many UK-based institutions working with controlled level data, such as the ONS, HMRC DataLab, Cancer Research UK, and The Health Foundation, amongst others. The purpose of SDAP is ‘to facilitate sharing of expertise, best practice and knowledge between organisations engaged in providing secure access to confidential sources of data from the health and social science research sector’.
The Network is now managed by SecureLab staff from the UK Data Service – a move voted for by SDAP members, which reflects the esteem in which UKDS SecureLab is held in the controlled data access field.
You can read more about the group by checking out the SDAP website and the blog post James and Chris wrote a few years ago.
#CiteTheData: leading on best practice for data citation
In 2019, we introduced compulsory data citation as one of the minimum requirements for output requests. In effect, this means that even if an output requested from UKDS SecureLab is fine from a Statistical Disclosure Control (SDC) perspective, if it does not include the full data citation – including the digital object identifier (doi) – it will not be released. This is now best practice across TREs and the proper citation of data benefits all the stakeholders in the research community.