Data-sharing agreements
Advice for preparing a data-sharing agreement with external parties to protect yourself, your project and your participants.
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Data sharing
Data sharing or transfer is a common practice and may occur between data or service providers, collaborators, or participants. Research projects must ensure that legal, ethical, data sovereignty and commercial constraints relating to primary materials and digital research data processing, access and storage are considered prior to data collection and adhered to throughout the research data lifecycle. This is particularly important where human data are concerned.
The requirements and obligations surrounding data sharing outside the University are many and relate to the following:
- The Privacy Act 2020
- National Ethical Standards
- University Research Data Management (RDM) Policy
Researchers may first consider privacy issues when proposing to collect data from or about participants as part of obtaining ethics approval. However, having ethics approval does not cover all the issues you need to consider when sharing (sending or receiving) data from external sources, and often, researchers need to share data before funding or ethics approval.
Data sharing or data transfer agreements reduce the University's exposure to legal and reputational risks and can support researchers in commercialising their research.
Other useful advice on data privacy and data management in New Zealand is available at data.govt.nz.
University requirements
According to the RDM Policy, researchers are responsible for ensuring collaborations with external parties have agreements in place that specify ownership and custodianship rights and responsibilities for research data.
These agreements must be signed by the appropriate University delegate. The agreements document arrangements for the following:
- Data governance and custodianship – how will decisions be made now and in the future?
- Intellectual property matters – who are the stakeholders and what are their rights and obligations?
- Liabilities – if things go wrong, who accepts responsibility? For what types of issues? And to what extent?
Getting an agreement
The Research Grants and Contracts team can support you with an agreement appropriately sized to your project. To request a data sharing or data transfer agreement, or to have the terms of an agreement sent to you by an external party reviewed and signed, contact your Faculty/Institute Research Services Team (FIRST).
This will ensure that any collaborations you have with external parties have agreements in place, executed by the appropriate University delegate, that specify ownership and custodianship rights and responsibilities for research data and primary materials.
If working with a large research partner in New Zealand, you may be covered by an existing ‘umbrella’ agreement. In either case, it is also important to understand whether there are already existing obligations with them and what these might entail.