Changes to prices for accessing Scottish datasets

The purpose of this joint blog is to set out the decision to raise prices for access to data from 1 April 2025.

Research Data Scotland (RDS) is a not-for-profit charity. eDRIS (the electronic Data Research and Innovation Service) is part of Public Health Scotland and is a public sector organisation. Our services provide support to the research community seeking access to public sector data. These services range from advice on data availability and data linkage to accessing the data via secure infrastructure. Our pricing recovers the costs to provide these services rather than for the data itself.

Access to Scotland wide datasets is now available through one entry point – a single enquiry form hosted on the RDS website – and requests are triaged through two routes – the Researcher Access Service (a digital pathway co-managed by RDS and eDRIS) or via the Health and Social Care Public Benefit and Privacy Panel (HSC-PBPP) or Statistics Benefit and Privacy Panel (S-PBPP).

So, what do the costs cover?

Researchers who have previously applied for access to data will be familiar with costs incurred for the services and technical infrastructure to support access to datasets. For academic research, these costs are usually covered by research grants and need to be included when applying for funding.

Up to now, the charges made by the Researcher Access Service and eDRIS service has covered direct costs of providing services by the eDRIS team, but not the costs of providing the Scottish National Safe Haven technical infrastructure and indexing service, as these have been funded through large scale Infrastructure Grants, which have now ended. This means we need to adjust how our pricing works to fully cover the costs of the whole system and so we can continue to invest in improving and scaling it in the future.

This is why we are introducing a sustainable pricing model, where each individual project contributes to all the costs of running the Scottish National Safe Haven. This will be alongside funding that organisations running Scottish National Safe Haven data services are able to bring in from other sources, such as central Government and infrastructure research grants. This will enable the services you use to keep running.

We see this as a one-off step change in pricing structure to bring our system to a level where it is covering costs.

Pay for what you use

As part of this change, we have decided to move to component pricing. Component pricing should be better for users, as you only pay for what you need, and this change means you will no longer see a price breakdown on our website anymore – you will get a bespoke cost estimate based on what you need following your enquiry. This approach may be familiar to you if you use other research data access services around the UK.

What does this mean?

If you have an active request for datasets, then there’s a grace period where your quote will be valid until the end of June.

We are offering an online drop-in session with a representative from eDRIS and RDS to give researchers and other users a chance to ask questions about this change in pricing. This session will take place on Wednesday 28 May from 10am - 11am via Microsoft Teams. Register here.

For new enquiries made after 1 April 2025, eDRIS research coordinators will provide researchers and other users a bespoke quote based on only what is needed for their project.

Building a world-class data access ecosystem

Over recent years, we have benefited from investment from Scottish Government and various UKRI investments – such as ADR Scotland – that have helped develop the Researcher Access Service, building upon the excellent services already in existence, widening the range of the data offered, and creating a robust data curation and governance approach that we can scale up in coming years.

These changes to prices will enable us to seek and win funding that allows us to continue to improve the quality and speed of the services that you use.

We will be monitoring impact for users. Find out more on our RAS Approval Pathway pricing page.

If you would like to share your views or concerns please contact engagement@researchdata.scot