Collaboration with the United Kingdom on data services infrastructures

In December, CASD had the pleasure of receiving a visit from Richard Welpton, Director of Data Services Infrastructure at UKRI (UK Research and Innovation), who is responsible for funding research infrastructure at the Ministry.

This visit is part of a long-standing collaboration with the UK, dating back to the creation of the CASD, notably during European projects (DWB and DARA) and in particular in the context of the IDAN (International Data Access Network) project.

Discussions during the visit were rich and covered many aspects: security and data processing technologies, confidentiality of results, documentation, quality of service… and financing.

Richard Welpton wrote a bill about his visit in which he concludes, with typical British politeness,“CASD is leading the way in secure data access to confidential and sensitive data sources for research through its innovation and client-based approach.By developing and deploying technologies, and making research support interesting and rewarding, CASD is showing us how to scale up research capacity in trusted research environments.”

Note that Richard Welpton is one of the authors of the first publication to present the 5 safes, which has been widely reprinted since 2016 (Desai T., Ritchie F., and Welpton R. (2016) The Five Safes: designing data access for research. Working papers in Economics no. 1601, University of the West of England, Bristol. January).