Research Data Storage FAQs

A project (from the Research Data Services perspective) is a body of work requiring data storage that has a start date, an end date, a title, a description and one or more people that are granted access to it. A project will often relate to a particular grant application, but ‘unfunded’ research projects can use the service.

The owner of project space on RDSS must be a current member of UCL staff and the Principal Investigator (PI) of the project for which the data is associated. The application must be submitted by this person. The PI will be the person who applied for the grant to fund the project or, in the case of ‘unfunded’ research, the person leading the research project. Additional users can be any staff or research student with a UCL username and password. In the case of PhD projects the supervisor should apply on behalf of their student.

We are trying to guard against the following situations:

• Important research data being forgotten about after the conclusion of a project, eventually becoming ‘orphaned’ as researchers move jobs or retire.
• Unwanted data being left on the service, taking up space that could be better used by others.
• Data not being moved to more appropriate long-term archive and repository services. Many research funders now require this, and it is useful to have a reminder before a project concludes that it’s time to archive the data.

By applying an end date to a project, it doesn’t mean that research on that topic should come to an end. However, it encourages our users to tidy-up/organise and annotate their data. When decisions have been made about what could reasonably be useful to themselves or to others, this data can be publicly archived and the rest discarded.

Knowing what our users are working on helps us to make decisions about which storage technologies we should be investing in for the future. Occasionally a project description can alert us to special considerations that we may be able to advise on.

As part of the normal Research Data Repository service this information may be harvested into the metadata for the archive, saving you the effort of having to enter the same data again.

Provided that your project falls within our guidelines, you will be allocated space on our live storage service. It is not necessary to qualify the value of your research to us, it’s not like applying for a grant!

Yes, but it should be clear that the purpose is different. There should be a distinct title and description.

Yes, we have the concept of an administrator. You can nominate one or more administrators during the registration process, and can add or remove administrators at any time using the web administration portal.

An administrator can add / remove members and make other changes to the project. Like the Principal Investigator, they can request changes to storage volume and project end date.

The RDS takes data security seriously and it should not be possible for unauthorised users to access your project folder. The hardware we use is kept in secure server rooms, and we apply strict user access controls to ensure only those authorised to do so can access the data hosted by the service. That said, we are not at present certified to the ISO 27001 standard nor authorised to host restricted NHS data. We therefore prohibit the use of the Research Data Storage Service for hosting unencrypted personally identifiable information or anything else that falls under the GDPR legislation of the UK Data Protection Act 2018.

As part of our terms of use, the Principal Investigator assumes the responsibility of ensuring that data uploaded to the service is not in breach of the Data Protection Act 2018 or other relevant legal and contractual agreements, including 3rd party agreements.

UCL Researchers working with sensitive data should consider using the Data Safe Haven, which provides a highly-secure ISO 27001-certified facility for data storage and processing.

UCL provides guidance on research data anonymisation in its web pages on Information Governance.

We don’t have a specific project size limit per se. So far we have been accepting storage requests up to 5 TB for all projects. For projects requesting larger quotas we will make decisions based on a balance of project size vs the remaining capacity on our storage system.

If your project has the budget to pay for storage beyond 5 TB, we will be happy to discuss this with you.

The RDSS will get in touch with the Principal Investigator and any assigned project administrators shortly before a project is scheduled to complete. If you would like an extension to the project lifespan, that’s fine, although the project will need to pay for extensions when they require greater than a 1TB capacity (at the standard annual rate).

If the project is indeed drawing to a close, any datasets requiring publication or long-term preservation should be moved to an appropriate data repository. If there are discipline-specific data repositories in your field then these should be considered first, otherwise the UCL Research Data Repository is the recommended option. Further information is available from UCL Library Services.

Files that are no longer required after the end of a research project should be deleted, although please consult your research funder’s policies and the UCL Research Data Policy before deleting files to verify that they do not need to be preserved for longer.

During 2015-2017 the Research Data Storage Service was primarily based on an iRODS/WOS data management and storage facility. This did not prove to be as reliable as we would have liked, and required users to install and use a third party software package (Cyberduck) if they wanted to upload or download data using a graphical user interface. In November 2017 we installed a new storage facility based on a type of file system known as GPFS or IBM Spectrumscale. This has proved much more dependable and is the default storage used by all new projects.

The new GPFS facility can be mounted as a local drive, provides better metadata support, and offers optional functionality such as snapshotting. We are in the process of migrating users of the iRODS/WOS facility to the new storage, although this will take some time.

We have now closed write access to the old iRODS/WOS facility and users of that facility who require continued access should request a priority migration.

If you have responsibility for supporting the research data storage needs of multiple projects in your department, and would like to talk to us about transferring them to RDS, please get in contact with us at Research Data-Support. We will arrange to meet up and discuss this in person. 

No, your PI must register the project.

No 

Yes, if the PI nominates them as members. 

In principle RDS and on occasion our hardware vendors can access your data. In practice we only look in your project directories if you ask us to or to investigate a problem with the operation of the service. 

There isn’t much that a PI can do that is privileged compared to the other members of his project group, except for choosing the project members. Also we cannot assign read only access to certain members at present. Our how-to guide explains the options that are available: 

RDS: How to control access for different members of a project

Yes, by using the UCL Research Data Repository. This acts as a data publication platform where you can upload data and publish it with a unique Digital Object Identifier. It will then be findable, downloadable (with an embargo period if desired), and citable by others.

Further information about the Repository is available from Research-Data-Repository.

Guidance on using the Repository is available from Research-Data-Repository.

Yes. Instructions for accessing and mounting your storage are provided with the welcome email you should have received when the project space was created. A more thorough guide to mounting your storage on windows is available from How-To-Mount-Research-Data-Storage-Service-Windows.

See our how-to guide: How to access RDS data from UCL's Research Computing Platforms

See our how-to guide: How to access RDS from outside UCL

A list of recommended programs can be found in our access guide. 

The underlying access mechanisms that we use for our service are SSH, SCP and SFTP. These are ubiquitous protocols and there are many client programs that can connect using them. Please see the bottom of our storage access guide for a list of some programs that can be used.

One to one support and guidance for data management planning is available from UCL Library Services. See their website for details: Research Data Management.

In the first instance, nothing will be removed without notifying you and giving you fair warning. If we haven’t heard from you, we will move your data to a medium term repository facility from which it can be recovered on request.

We have recently deployed the Research Data Repository where you will be able to publish any data you wish to make public. Please see the Research Data Repository website.

Alternative data repositories may also be available to you. See the Research Data Management pages on the UCL Library Service website for guidance.