The UK Data Service is the largest digital repository for quantitative and qualitative social science and humanities research data in the UK. This national data service integrates and builds on investments the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) has made in UK research infrastructure for over 50 years, including the UK Data Archive, Economic and Social Data Service, the Secure Data Service, Census Programme and Survey Question Bank.The UK’s only nationally funded research infrastructure for curating and providing access to social science data, their services and expertise, especially around data curation and secure access to data, have been influential across the world. Pioneers in data curation, preservation and enabling secure, long-term access to economic, social and population data, their long-established data training programme continues to transform social science teaching, learning and research.Through enabling long-term research access to invaluable data, the UK Data Service plays a critical part in helping build a stronger society and creating better lives for people in the UK. They add value to key national data investments by continuing to make them reusable long-term, enabling research with real impact; train researchers in highly specialist data skills, previously lacking in the UK and they enable those who teach social sciences to use real data to bring their teaching to life.As a free service to data owners and free at the point of use to non-commercial data users, they provide long term value for money to both data owners and data users..
Synthetic data is increasingly recognised as a powerful tool for accelerating research, training, and innovation within Trusted Research Environments (TREs), but its safe and responsible use requires clear governance standards and shared best practices. To address this need, the UK Synthetic Data Community Group (SDCG) was established with DARE UK funding to convene leaders across the synthetic data landscape and build national consensus on responsible synthetic data development and release. The UK SDCG engaged more than 140 stakeholders from over 35 organisations across academia, industry, government, and the public. Through a series of workshops involving researchers, domain experts, data custodians, and public contributors, we gathered perspectives on opportunities, risks, and expectations surrounding the use of synthetic data in secure environments. Discussions focused on governance challenges, quality and utility requirements, disclosure risk considerations, and transparency needs for users and data owners. These engagements informed the development of the VSTAR Framework, which contains five core principles for responsible synthetic data practice: Valuable, Safe, Transparent, Accessible, and Representative. Together, these principles provide a structured, practical foundation for TREs and data custodians to guide the generation, evaluation, and dissemination of synthetic datasets. The framework aims to promote consistency across infrastructures, strengthen trust and accountability, and support the adoption of synthetic data as a complementary tool that enhances secure access to real-world data. The VSTAR Framework represents a national step toward coherent governance for synthetic data, offering a scalable and community-driven model to support privacy-preserving innovation across the UK’s data research ecosystem.
In 2026, applying for access to data is still more complex and challenging for researchers than it should be. To some extent, this is because access & usage policies are still largely mediated by humans, compounded by a lack of alignment between organisations as to how access processes and workflows are implemented, with little supporting machine-actionable information to improve the situation through automation. This not only degrades the researcher experience, it inhibits progress on federating infrastructures for data that is not completely open. Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) has been around for over a decade but is now gaining significant traction in a number of arenas as a mechanism to address the problem of machine-actionable access, usage, and rights management more generally. The recent and rapid advent of agentic AI is now making rights management for digital objects a priority issue that can no longer be deferred. “Access” is one of the key planks in the Cross-Domain Interoperability Framework (CDIF) and builds out implementable specifications for the “A” in FAIR. This presentation outlines the work that the UK Data Service has so far undertaken to move ODRL from a standard to an implementable set of metadata, workflows, and tools. We also articulate in detail how this is not merely a simple exercise in translating prose licences to RDF but requires a deeper understanding of the context in which “Access” operates. We also describe how standards such as Data Use Ontology (DUO) and Data Privacy Vocabulary (DPV) complement ODRL within that context.
The International Secure Data Facility Professionals Network (ISDFPN) was set up in 2022 as part of the Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud project (SSHOC) with the aim of bringing together international colleagues working in or towards Trusted Research Environments (TREs), to share expertise and experiences, and to spark collaboration as well as develop new ideas. While various international networks and collaborations exist currently, these aim to improve the international data infrastructure landscape, and mainly focus on establishing connections between TREs. However, there is also a Forum needed for those working in these TREs, which provides a platform for regular knowledge exchange as well as opportunities of driving innovation. ISDFPN is not a network for developing infrastructure, rather it is a place to share experience, expertise, and ideas, which is not yet formally available internationally. As the fast-changing secure data landscape evolves, this Network will be a vital resource for collaborative work towards finding solutions for shared and newly emerging problems experienced by TRE staff. Where TREs are at different stages in their development, such a forum is vital as services seek to learn from each another. The ISDFPN held its first virtual meeting on 30 March 2022, and, although the SSHOC project finished in April 2022, has continued to meet twice yearly, co-Chaired by the UK Data Service, and GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences. This paper traces the ISDFPN from its origins and highlights both its aims and objectives as well as its activities so far.
This paper explores an enhanced curation lifecycle being developed at the UK Data Service (UKDS), with our Data Product Builder. Through a Graphical User Interface, we aim to provide the researcher with a tailored digital resource. We detail the threefold motivation behind this initiative: data dissemination scalability, researcher satisfaction and the reduction of nationwide duplication of research effort. Subsequent sections detail the technical components and challenges involved. In addition to more standard data subsetting, filtering and linking components, this data dissemination platform offers dynamic disclosure assessments – identifying combinations of variables that present a potential disclosure risk. All components are underpinned by the Data Documentation Initiative’s new Cross-Domain Integration standard (DDI-CDI), designed to handle the many structures in which data may be organised. Ever conscious of the scale of the task we are embarking on, we remain motivated by the need for such advances in data dissemination and optimistic of the feasibility of such a system to meet the needs of the researcher while balancing the data disclosivity concerns of the data depositor.
