Drop-in Q&A - price changes for data application support services for accessing Scottish datasets: 28 May 2025

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 to support services. This session will take place on Wednesday 28th May from 10am - 11am via Microsoft Teams.

Click here to register.

Accessing Scottish datasets

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).

Why are prices changing?

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.

How will this affect researchers and other service users?

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.

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. 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.

For more information about these pricing changes, check out this blog post by Professor Roger Halliday, CEO of Research Data Scotland and Carole Morris, Head of Service at Public Health Scotland.

Further information can be found here.

If you have any questions, or if you would like to share your views or concerns but cannot attend the drop-in session, please contact engage@researchdata.scot.