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Apply for OpenSAFELY research access🔗

If you wish to use OpenSAFELY against real patient data sets, then you need to apply for research access.

However, in line with our Open Manifesto, OpenSAFELY's software is open source and free of charge for anyone to use. Even without research approval, you can still use OpenSAFELY to work with synthetic data and evaluate whether how OpenSAFELY could benefit your research.

Note

We suggest that anyone interested in OpenSAFELY completes the Getting Started tutorial, though this is not a requirement for application.

OpenSAFELY research application form🔗

We have an online application form where you can:

  • Describe your proposed research.
  • Give details of the research team who would require access to OpenSAFELY.

What you will need to apply🔗

  • A free GitHub account, for accessing the sign-up process. We use GitHub for submitting study jobs to OpenSAFELY.
    • If you do not already have a GitHub account, you can create a GitHub account during the sign-up process.
  • Information about your proposed research and research team:
    • Contact details for the lead study author.
    • The reasons for you requesting OpenSAFELY data access, including references from research ethics committee approval.
    • An outline of the proposed research.
    • Details about your team, including information on:
      • Your team's research background (for example, experience of working with electronic health care records, and your experience of programming languages used for statistical analysis, such as R, Stata or Python).
      • Your team's funding.
      • Details of the team members requesting access to OpenSAFELY, including whether they have completed "safe researcher" training.

How your application is processed and reviewed.🔗

(TODO: This is still sketchy here.)

  1. You fill in the application form and submit it.
  2. Both you and the OpenSAFELY team should receive confirmation of your application.
  3. TODO: Is someone notified on changes? You will receive further updates on the progress of your application. On review, we may add notes to the form for your information. An OpenSAFELY reviewer might request that you update the form based on those notes.
  4. Any other researchers included in your application will also be contacted regarding their access.
  5. If your application is approved, we will contact you about our onboarding process.

(TODO: Not sure of the exact order here: is an application approved, then Amir contacts the researchers for more details, or he contacts the individual researchers first?)

Questions?🔗

If you have general questions or feedback about using the form, you can use our Q&A forum. For specific questions about your application, you can email: applications@opensafely.org.