About us

International collaboration

We are known as pioneers in developing best practice in the reuse of data for research and are frequently asked by overseas universities, government departments and data archives, to share knowledge, expertise or training. We work on many projects across the UK and internationally through formal collaboration and informal networks.

The UK Data Archive has long been a key contributor to the formation of the network of European Social Science Data Archives, actually dating back to the 1970s, and has been instrumental in helping it expand and grow, in June 2017, to become a legal Consortium of European Service Providers to deliver large-scale research infrastructure. We currently lead in three areas of planning and service delivery.

As a key member of the International Data Access Network (IDAN), a collaboration between six Research Data Centres (RDC) from France, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK, we are helping to facilitate research use of controlled access data between these countries for the first time, through the UK Data Service. This significantly helps to address the challenges that researchers currently encounter when trying to access data from outside the country they are working in.

We recently announced our involvement in the FAIRsFAIR project, a new initiative to develop an overall knowledge infrastructure for academic quality data management based on FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) principles. FAIRsFAIR involves 22 partners in eight EU member states and runs until 2022.

Other important networks we actively participate in include:

An international consortium of more than 750 academic institutions and research organizations, Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) provides leadership and training in data access, curation, and methods of analysis for the social science research community.

National Opinion Research Center (NORC): A data centre that pioneered secure data services and worked with us to build our own Secure Data Service.
Synergies for Europe’s Research Infrastructure in the Social Sciences (SERISS): an EC project that aims to provide socio-economic evidence to help countries across Europe tackle challenges such as youth unemployment, ageing populations, and transport and housing.