I’m leaving SLU for employment with another organisation. Can I take with me the data that I have collected during my research here and continue to work on them in my new position?

Responsibilities and legal status of research data

Research data collected or generated as part of an employment at SLU pertains to the university, not to the individual employee. Such data are official documents and must be archived at SLU and may not be dispersed. This means that if you have not already handed over data to the responsible department for archiving, you must do this at the end of your employment at the latest. You can read about this in the SLU data management policy.

• SLU data management policy

For help with archiving, contact the person responsible for archiving and registering routines at your department (“RA-rollen”) or turn to Data Management Support for guidance.

If you want to have access to and continue working on the data you collected at SLU in your future position, it may be possible for you to obtain a copy of the data, provided there are no secrecy provisions, and subject to the approval of the head of department. For help determining whether you can obtain a copy or not, contacting the head of department and the Unit for archives, information governance and records (Air) is a good start.

• Archives, information governance and records (Air)

If there are data protection or other secrecy issues (including such which follow from confidentiality clauses in a contract) associated with the data, an SLU legal counsel may need to be consulted. Please note that, depending on the character of the data, you may need to obtain additional permissions to work with them in new research contexts.  If research data need to be transferred from one university to another as part of a collaboration project or because a research activity changes principals, special arrangements and agreements may need to be made regarding data responsibilities and how data should be handled (secrecy, right of use, transfer, storage, archiving etc).

• Legal affairs

Publishing data

In line with open science principles it is SLU policy, as well as that of many funders and publishers, that research data should be published and made available as openly as possible in a data respository, provided this is permitted from a legal, security, ethical and commercial perspective.  When you do this, you and others in the research community as well as the general public will have access to the data without being employed at SLU. For help with data publishing, contact Data Management Support. 

• Share and publish data