Editorial commentary
The UK Data Service is the UK’s principal social and economic data infrastructure, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). It holds the UK’s major government and academic survey data — including the UK Longitudinal Household Study (Understanding Society) — census microdata, a qualitative data archive, and international macro-data resources, and is the UK’s principal node within CESSDA, the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives.
Three access tiers
UKDS operates a three-tier access policy: Open data, available with no registration barrier; Safeguarded data, licensed under an End User Licence requiring registration and agreement not to attempt to identify individuals, households, or organisations in the data or disseminate identifying information; and Controlled (Secure) data, restricted to trained and accredited researchers whose access has been approved by the relevant Data Access Committee, granted only through a physical or virtual secure environment. Controlled access applies the Five Safes framework — safe projects, safe people, safe settings, safe data, safe outputs — the same governance model used by the UK Office for National Statistics and other UK trusted research environments.
Certification
UKDS holds CoreTrustSeal certification, positioning it as a recognised trusted digital repository for social and economic research data rather than a general-purpose or informal archive.
What it is not
UKDS is a domain repository for social and economic data specifically — it is not a generalist repository, and researchers depositing data outside its social-science/economic scope (e.g. biomedical or environmental data) should look to a domain repository appropriate to that field, or a generalist repository if none exists.
References
- UK Data Service, ‘About UKDS’, ‘Types of Data Access’ and ‘Access Conditions’ (ukdataservice.ac.uk).
- See also: CESSDA, Trusted Research Environments and the Five Safes Framework, data management plan.
Also known as
UKDS · UK Data Archive
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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