Data Access Committee - Why Do We Need One?

Data sharing has the potential to accelerate research discoveries and improve medical care and best practice in other practitioner-led fields. However, it is also important to prevent data misuse and exploitation. Data access committees (DACs) can help manage the data access process by reviewing requests and deciding whether or not to grant access. Data access Committees (DACs) represent one institutional safeguard charged with applying rules meant to ensure an ethically permissible balance between data protection and accessibility. DACs may grant direct access to datasets sent digitally in secure form to data users or that are stored in secure computing environments (e.g. a data safe haven).

This was a workshop led by Dr. Kirsty Merrett, Research Support Librarian from the University of Bristol. The title of this workshop was "Data Access Committee - Why Do We Need One?" This extremely helpful workshop provided extensive information on the DAC at University of Bristol, explaining the governance, frequency of meetings, access controls (open data versus restricted/controlled data), processing times for data access requests, and suggested quick wins for any institution hoping to implement their own DAC.

Kirsty delivered this workshop to the University Research Data Management sub-group. This contains selected representatives from the Library, Research and Enterprise, Information Compliance Unit & Digital Information Services. The event was organised and arranged by Dr. Michael O'Connor, Research Data Librarian at Queen's University Belfast.