The Edinburgh DataVault is a secure long-term retention solution for research data.

Thanks to the hard work of our software developers in the Digital Library and EDINA, the Edinburgh DataVault now facilitates five different user roles. This means busy PIs can delegate the work of depositing and retrieving data, to members of their team or other collaborators within the University. It also allows PIs to nominate support staff to deposit and retrieve data on their behalf, or grant access to new members of their team.

Diagram representing a PI and two postdocs using the roles of Owner and Nominated Data Manager to share access to data in the DataVault

There are five user roles:

• Data Owner
  Usually the Principal Investigator. Can add/remove other users to their vault(s).
• Nominated Data Manager (of a given vault)
  Can view and edit metadata fields, deposit data and retrieve any deposit in the vault. May add/remove Depositors to the vault.
• Depositor (of a given vault)
  Can view the vault contents, deposit data and retrieve any deposit in the vault.
• School Support Officer
  Acting on behalf of the Head of School, may view all vaults and associated deposits belonging to the School.
• School Data Manager
  Assigned only with the express permission of the Head of School, may view, deposit into and retrieve data from any vault belonging to the School.

Full details of the permissions associated with each role:
Roles and permissions

Support staff who need to view reporting data for their School, or admin access to their School’s vaults, should attend our training – Edinburgh DataVault: supporting users archiving their research data.

Further information on why and how to use the DataVault is available on the Research Data Service website:
DataVault long-term retention

If you have any questions about using DataVault please don’t hesitate to contact the Research Data Support team at data-support@ed.ac.uk.

Pauline Ward, Research Data Support Assistant
Library and University Collections
@PaulineData