Trust, transparency and the public good: reflections from our public workshops

On any Saturday in Edinburgh there’s plenty for locals and visitors to do - shopping, museums, theatre, and countless more. However, on one Saturday in May, a group of 32 people headed into Edinburgh city centre for something a little different. They were there to talk data and make change.

This group of people had been brought together to discuss how public sector data should be accessed for research, for what reasons and by whom. Over the last few years, Research Data Scotland (RDS) has been developing the Researcher Access Service, a platform which launched in 2024 to make it faster and simpler for researchers to access data. The public are at the heart of our mission at RDS, and it’s vital that we continue to reflect this as we develop and improve our services.

Our starting point was to speak with our Scotland Talks Data panel about the Researcher Access Service. With their input we identified three main areas to discuss in workshops:

• Defining public good – create a definition of public good for heath and non—health data research projects, to be used by researchers and data access panels.
• Public involvement – input into how and where the public should be involved in process of data access.
• Private sector – discuss how private sector companies can work with academia or public sector organisations when accessing public sector data for research.

To help with this next stage, we commissioned market research company Ipsos and over the next few months turned our broad questions into a series of workshops and recruited participants to attend. We opted to focus on non-health data scenarios because less is understood about public opinion in this area.

Key insights and next steps 

So, what did we learn? High level findings aligned with what we see in other public engagement work; the public are broadly supportive of data for research for public good if safeguards are in place.

When it comes to public good, participants expressed some of the impact they would like to see research working towards, whilst also recognising that research which fills a knowledge gap or moves understanding forward with no tangible outcome can also be considered public good. They were keen to see the public involved in the approval process and had suggestions on how this should be delivered.

Despite some scepticism towards commercial entities, participants accepted that private sector access to public sector data could be beneficial if subject to the same rigorous ‘public good’ criteria and appropriate safeguards, with vetting any private sector organisation requesting access being deemed essential.

Despite this work only wrapping up in June, we’ve already used our learnings to set up a Public Impact and Advisory Group as part of the Researcher Access Service. We are also using incorporating findings from the report as we develop a common Operational Framework for simplified access to public sector data by the private sector, in line with the highest ethical and legal standards. This framework is being developed by RDS on behalf of the Scottish Government and will align with Scottish Government policy in this area to support the aims of the Unlocking the Value of Data programme.

Read more about the report and how we plan to use these findings here.

These discussions with members of the public are important to inform how RDS progresses and making sure we maintain public trust in what we do. This piece of work is part of ongoing conversations with members of the public, and you can find out more about our other public engagement and involvement activities here.

We also work closely with organisations across the UK who are doing public engagement to make sure we are learning from each other and are up to date with public opinion. You can find more of these types of reports collated by PEDRI, DARE UK and Understanding Patient Data.