Of all the data files available in the DANS Data Station SSH around 21% are published under restricted access: A file can only be accessed and reused after permission has been granted by the data owner. The possibility for publishing restricting access is crucial to make data reusable that cannot be shared open access. This can be the case, for instance, if data includes personal information or if a project concerns a sensitive topic.
All the DANS Data Stations as well as DataverseNL provide the option to publish restricted access and DANS has created additional guidance for depositors. In making restricted access data FAIR, special attention needs to be paid to the Accessibilty of the data. In particular a detailed description of how and under what conditions the data can be accessed should be included with the data files. As data access depends on the evaluation of incoming requests, depositors need to carefully consider their role in this process. One of the common problems in reusing restricted access data is a slow response time after a request has been submitted. Even worse are cases where depositors become unavailable to answer requests, making data effectively inaccessible. To avoid requests that will not be granted it is also crucial that the metadata and documentation of a dataset specify the conditions under which access is granted. DANS promotes the use of Data Access Protocols where all of this information is captured. Yet to date many restricted access datasets do not include such information, which makes it difficult for users to judge whether they are eligible for reuse.
To gather more insights into the access conditions that depositors currently apply to restricted access data and the processes they follow when evaluating requests, DANS and ODISSEI conducted a small scale survey last year. The results of the survey were presented at International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC25) in February 2025 and the corresponding paper has been published now.
In the conference paper, which is available open access at the International Journal of Digital Curation, the authors note that various conditions are applied to restricted access datasets and that these conditions are often not explicitly included in the documentation when a dataset is submitted to a repository. The results also showed that standardised processes for evaluating requests and deciding whether to accept or reject a request are not always in place but rather that decisions are often made case-by-case.
Based on the survey results, the authors present six recommendations directed at data owners and repositories, which could help to improve the transparency of the access conditions in the future.
Recommendations include the creation of more standardised descriptions of conditions for access to improve the interoperability, as well as stronger commitment to make data available as ‘open as possible’ including extensive information about data access for restricted access datasets.
The conference paper is available https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v19i1.1048
