Abstract

The Research Data Center (FDZ) of the German Federal Employment Agency (BA) at the Institute of Employment Research (IAB) and the Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research (CISER) in Ithaca, NY, USA jointly work on a research endeavor which aims to improve access to FDZ’s Scientific Use Files (SUFs). SUFs are factually anonymous data which are specially designed for off-site access. After the conclusion of a use agreement with FDZ, researchers downloaded the data file requested from a secure exchange server and store the data on their local IT system. Once the use agreement has expired, the researcher must delete the data from his system and confirm the deletion to FDZ. Although well established, this procedure bears a lot of disadvantages and risks with respect to confidentiality and data protection. In this research project, FDZ and CISER will try to overcome these issues by integrating SUFs in the Cornell Restricted Access Data Center (CRADC). Researchers will still be able to access SUFs off-site but the data are stored within the secure computing environment of CRADC.