DPA Plan

Ethics reference number:  ERGO/FEPS/64054

Study Title: PSDS ACD/Labs Trial Evaluation

Investigator: Nicola Knight, Simon Coles

The following is an exhaustive and complete list of all the data that will be collected (through questionnaires):
Name, Institution and Email address (to determine eligibility for participation in trial and communication related to trial), domain (or subdomain) of work, their usage of the ACD/Labs software and their opinion on the ACD/Labs software.

The following data will be collected by ACD/Labs at the point of installation:
Email address (to send an activation key for the software).

The data is relevant to the trial purposes because it gathers the opinions of participants on the relevance of the product to their research and allows evaluation of its suitability to inclusion in the service.  The data is adequate because it captures enough information to evaluate the suitability of the software, and the data are not excessive because it only asks questions relevant to the ACD/Labs software and do not require personal information beyond what is required for the evaluation trial.

The data will be processed fairly and the participants will have given explicit consent and deliberately made the data available.

The data’s accuracy is ensured because the participants have provided it themselves. In many questions an ‘other’ option has been provided if the participants answer does not fit within the defined answers.

Questionnaire data will be stored on in Microsoft Forms and once exported will be stored on an institutional Teams site, with access granted only to the PSDS team members that require it. The data will be held in accordance with University policy on data retention.

Data files will be protected by restriction to permitted authenticated users; laptops will be protected by passwords; desktops will be protected by passwords; no physical data will be kept.

The raw data files will be destroyed by Nicola Knight on conclusion of the data analysis through deletion from the filestore and destruction of any backups. The anonymised analysed data will be kept in compliance with the University of Southampton’s Research Data Management Policy.

The data will be processed in accordance with the rights of the participants because they will have the right to access, correct, and/or withdraw their data at any time and for any reason. Participants will be able to exercise their rights by contacting the investigator (e-mail: N.Knight@soton.ac.uk)

The questionnaire data will be anonymised by removal of the name and email address and removal of any identifying information if this has been included in free-text fields. Consent details will be kept via the participants responses on Microsoft Forms until the end of the study, on a password protected filestore. The analysed findings of this trial will be shared with the software partner, ACD/Labs, this will not include any identifiable information or the raw results from the surveys.

No questionnaire data will be transferred outside the UK.

The data submitted during the installation process is subject to ACD/Labs privacy policy https://www.acdlabs.com/company/privacypolicy.php and is used purely for the purpose of transmitting the activation code.