Requesting access to the UK Biobank through SDCA’s project

Published

September 18, 2024

Warning

First and foremost, you must be employed by either Aarhus University or by Region Midt and your research topic must fall under our UK Biobank project application.

Whether you are wanting to propose a project or want to contribute to an existing project, you need to follow these easy steps, one by one. Importantly, you have to wait for approval of step 1 before you can continue with step 2. And you need to complete step 3 before moving on the next steps.

  1. Register yourself at UK Biobank. This may take a few weeks. You must register under either Aarhus University Hospital or Aarhus University as the affiliated institution, as we only have project access through those, and NOT SDCA. If you have registered under SDCA, no worries, you can easily change this afterwards.

  2. Use the same details as above to register for the UKB Research Analysis Platform (UKB RAP), which is hosted by DNAnexus.

  3. Log in on the UKB RAP and check that your username and email have been registered. You will need these details when you fill in the request form.

  4. Create a GitHub account if you don’t have one already. You will need your user name when filling in the Form below.

Important

A project in this sense would be considered a Git repository (hosted on GitHub). And one project should link to only one paper. So 1 project = 1 Git repository = 1 published paper.

Proposing a new project

Now that you’ve done the steps above, you follow these steps to submit a project proposal for working with the UK Biobank. Complete this step if you will be the primary lead on the project if there are planned contributors.

  1. Fill in the Google Form below. All the details you include in this form will be uploaded online to the ukbAid repository. When you submit the form, it will automatically create a Pull Request of your Project Proposal on the ukbAid GitHub repository that the organizing committee will use to get more information or details before approving the project.

  2. Once your project has been approved, we will create a project repository for you on GitHub that will also contain an Issue with a list of todo items. After that, follow the instructions in the Initial setup page, as well as the Working in the Research Analysis Platform (RAP) page. You can then log into the RAP and familiarize yourself with the RAP.

Being a contributor to an existing project

If you want to contribute to one or more existing projects, you will need to fill in this registration form. Please fill in the Google Form below. We will add you once we’ve determined if you are able to be added as a contributor (for legal and admin purposes that are outside of our control).