RDS publishes new business plan

Research Data Scotland’s (RDS) mission is to promote and advance health and social wellbeing in Scotland by enabling access to public sector data about people, places and businesses.

Established by the Scottish Government in 2021, we work to connect researchers to public sector data, making it faster and simpler to generate evidence to help others improve society.

Now in our fourth year as an independent charity, we have published our latest business plan outlining priorities in four key areas:

• Aligning approaches, building and demonstrating trustworthiness
• Shaping and delivering researcher services
• Unlocking Scotland’s data
• A sustainable system

Priorities include, among others:

• Simplify how RDS and partners are branded and collectively talk about our offer to researchers as part of a unified Scottish research infrastructure.
• Speed up each part of the time researchers spend getting data: the time researchers spend completing an application for data access, the time it takes to get approvals for projects, and time researchers wait for access to data in the National Safe Haven once their project has been approved.
• Increase the number of projects delivered through the Researcher Access Service and increase the number of Scottish datasets included in the RDS metadata catalogue.