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Data Access Policy: introduction

In this section

The aims of Oxford Population Health (the Nuffield Department of Population Health, ‘the department’) are:

  • to study the major causes of morbidity and mortality by conducting high quality research that generates reliable results about the causes of, and treatments for, such diseases; and
  • to provide high quality training in the methods of population health research, in particular by encouraging the use of the department’s many large-scale data resources.   

The Department welcomes data access requests that further these aims

The department will make the data from its studies readily available to external researchers in accordance with the ‘Guidance on best practice in the management of research data’ 1, the UK Concordat on Open Research Data2, and the Expert Advisory Group on Data Access.3 We aim to ensure that each individual data resource complies (wherever possible within legal and practical constraints) with the ‘FAIR principles’ that data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable.4

The purpose of this overarching Data Access Policy is twofold:

  • to set out the high-level departmental strategy, as well as to outline general considerations which may be relevant to access different data sets; and
  • to outline approaches and considerations that the department’s investigators responsible for particular studies have taken into account when developing study-specific access policies and procedures. (For example, the arrangements for accessing data from the department’s large cohort studies differ from those, such as meta-analyses of individual patient data from randomised trials, where study data cannot legally be shared.)

This Data Access Policy covers access to raw data, summary tables and analyses which are not released in publications or online from all studies held by the department, regardless of the original study location or the source of funding. Access to data may be through provision of datasets, or results resulting from analyses conducted de novo by the study team (eg tables or figures) or in collaboration with external researchers. It does not cover Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, data subject access requests under the Data Protection Act (DPA) 2018, or requests for access to biosamples. FOI and data subject access requests should be made to the department[1]; access to biosamples should be made to the individual study directly.

Individual studies may need to charge some applicants for access; this will be made clear during the application process.

 

Data Access Policy v3 published October 2025