Business Services

Research Data Scotland is a new service which offers a single point of contact for help accessing public sector data in a safe, secure and cost-effective way for research purposes, innovation and investment that brings public benefit.

Research Data Scotland is a not-for-profit organisation supporting research institutions to help them access public sector data to conduct research which will have a public benefit. 

Researchers will only be able to access public sector data if they are from recognised organisations and have the appropriate training credentials.  Researchers will only be able to use de-identified data which be made available in controlled, secured environments where limits and conditions will placed on usage by the relevant data controllers and approval processes.

All results from research conducted through RDS must be capable of being published for the public benefit. Any commercial benefits will be shared back into RDS to improve public services. For private sector organisations, the same conditions apply for research institutions but a licensing model may be considered which will allow the benefits from the use of the data to be shared with other researchers.

Our initial service offering is focused on the creation of a Data Catalogue which proves oversight to data as well as building researcher support services. Over the next 18 months RDS and its partners will roll out new services and functionality to help researchers and analysts to unlock value from public sector data. These will include a linkage ready data holdings portfolio, a catalogue of various public sector datasets and metadata, researcher triage support, data analysis and data controller services.