Approved Protected Access Repositories

A “PA” (Protected Access) notation may be added to open data badges if sensitive, personal data are available only from an approved third party repository that manages access to data to qualified researchers through a documented process. To be eligible for an open data badge with such a notation, the repository must publicly describe the steps necessary to obtain the data and detailed data documentation (e.g. variable names and allowed values) must be made available publicly. This notation is not available to researchers who state that they will make “data available upon request” and is not available if requests for data sharing are evaluated on any criteria beyond considerations for compliance with proper handling of sensitive data. For example, this notation is not available if limitations are placed on the permitted use of the data, such as for data that are only made available for the purposes of replicating previously published results or for which there is substantive review of analytical results. Review of results to avoid disclosure of confidential information is permissible.

List of approved protected access repositories

• Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR)
  • Including the National Addiction & HIV Data Archive Program
• The National Center for Health Statistics at the CDC
• The NIMH Data Archive (NDA)
• The National Database for Clinical Trials Related to Mental Illness (NDCT)
• QDR, Qualitative Data Repository
• Research Data Center of the SOEP
• The Human Connectome Project (policy)
• Databrary (Particularly good for protected access to video data)
• Datorium
• DataFirst
• PsychData
• The University of Bristol’s Research Data Repository (See "Restricted" and Controlled" access data specification here.)
• The UK Data Service
• The UK Biobank (Policy for Access) (Note that there is a £250 fee to cover administrative costs of evaluating ethical and legal compliance with data requests)
• Vivli

More such repositories may be found using the "restricted access" filter at Re3Data.

Adding a new repository to this list

Please email badges@cos.io if you would like to have a repository evaluated for inclusion to this list.