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The Secure Access User Agreement is an important and compulsory document in the application process – it must be fully executed and in place before the UK Data Service can give you access to SecureLab.
Below we’ve provided some guidance on when you should complete it and who you should approach at your organisation to countersign it.
The User Agreement is a legally binding contract between you, your organisation and the University of Essex, which is the legal entity for the UK Data Service. It ensures that you and your organisation are both aware of your legal responsibilities surrounding your access to controlled data in SecureLab – this is particularly important for your organisation, because penalties, such as a loss of ESRC funding, may be levied at an organisational level in the event of a data breach. The User Agreement was written by the University of Essex’s legal team, so we are not a signatory party to the Agreement and we are unable to accept edited versions of the Agreement. The Agreement outlines the terms and conditions of use of SecureLab and includes:
Agreement that you will complete our training.
Information about your security responsibilities, e.g. not sharing your password, nor disclosing or compromising any Personal Information.
Information about penalties and breaches, set out in our Licence Compliance Policy.
Our outputs release policy.
Our citation and copyright requirements.
The Agreement is a per person, per organisation agreement. You therefore only need to complete it once whilst you are at your current institution – if you were to move organisation and still require access to SecureLab, then you would need to complete and submit a new Agreement.
You will be able to download the Agreement from within your request for Secure Access data on your project – you will see that there is a step called ‘Complete Secure Access User Agreement’ within the workflow for your request and the form is available to download there.
Your Agreement must be countersigned by an appropriate officer with the authority to sign on behalf of the organisation from which you will be accessing the UK Data Service SecureLab.
The signatory must be sufficiently senior within the organisation and authorised to accept legal responsibility for your data access on behalf of the entire organisation. By signing, they acknowledge and accept the rigour of the statements within the agreement, confirming their status as an authorised signatory.
We advise you to get in touch with your Research and Contracts Office, Legal and Contracts Department, or similar entity, to identify an authorised signatory for your organisation. Suitable signatories for the agreement typically include Head of Research Contracts, Director of Research, Head of Research Support, Contracts Director and the Head of Department.
Ideally, yes. We can only accept PDF versions of the Agreement, so most researchers arrange for the form to be physically signed and then provide us with a scan of that hard copy. However, we do also accept Agreements that have been DocuSigned and the signatures verifiable. We do not accept Agreements where ‘signatures’ are typed without using DocuSign, even if they’re typed in a handwriting font.
To avoid any confusion with multiple emails, we recommend that you hold off sending your project application documents to us until your Agreement is fully executed, then submit all required documents attached to one email. However, we recognise that it can sometimes take a number of weeks for an Agreement to be signed off at an organisational level and as the Agreement is between you, your organisation and us, we do not send it to the data owners alongside the project application forms. It can therefore be sent later in the process if needed, but the sooner you can get it to us, the better, and please don’t send it before you’ve completed and submitted the rest of the application documents.
