Research Data Scotland has signed a memorandum of understanding with Smart Data Foundry for researchers to securely access public sector and financial data for the public benefit.
The collaboration, which will initially run for two years, will build on their existing work together, aimed at helping policy makers look at issues like poverty, the cost-of-living crisis and the value of early interventions.
The two organisations, which operate from the new Edinburgh Futures Institute, will combine their areas of expertise to generate insights in the public benefit.
They will cooperate in areas including: joint exploration opportunities for collaborative research and development projects: information sharing on relevant sector developments; public engagement; research and insights in areas of mutual interest; sharing best practice; and exploring opportunities for joint service development.
Organisational parallels
Layla Robinson, chief partnership and strategy officer at RDS, said: "Our organisations have lots of parallels - opening up systems to allow research to take place faster and acting in the interest for public good, for example.
"The pandemic accelerated the expansion of our digital lives - so many services moved online, creating large amounts of data about spending habits and shopping behaviours. Securely accessing and researching this kind of anonymised banking data can help us better understand how we live.
"These digital footprints - or smart data - could have real power if linked with public sector data. Linking them enables us to develop a more detailed picture of our lives and might enable us to look at links between poverty and chronic ill health, for example. This would allow policy making to be made on increasingly accurate information and insights."
“The focus will be on increasing the discoverability of data for evidence, knowledge generation and ultimately insights and evidence based policy making.”
Private-public combinations
Magdalena Getler, head of academic engagement at Smart Data Foundry, said: "This partnership allows us to harness the potential of combining financial data from the private sector with public sector data. We are looking forward to collaborating on projects that merge data from these areas to gain valuable insights for research and innovation.
“The focus will be on increasing the discoverability of data for evidence, knowledge generation and ultimately insights and evidence based policy making. Key to this is providing a researcher-centred infrastructure and type of data and functionality that researchers need.”
Research Data Scotland is a charity connecting researchers to public sector data and Smart Data Foundry is a not-for-profit subsidiary of the University of Edinburgh.
