Submit data

Introduction for data provider

ELIXIR-LU offers the following services for research data: hosting, access provision and findability through the ELIXIR-LU Data Catalog. If you want us to host your data and provide access to third parties, please contact our data stewards via email. We will get in touch and discuss your use case to define the services we can provide.


Data can be hosted on our platform under open or controlled access:
  • Open access:
    Any registered ELIXIR-LU user can access data in an unrestricted manner. This option is only possible for anonymised data.

  • Controlled access:
    The data provider must establish a data access policy that is used by the Data Access Committee to handle access requests from users.
Data providers can choose which type of access to use when preparing the data transfer to ELIXIR-LU. The data users can access controlled data after signing the ELIXIR-LU Data Use Agreement, guaranteeing that they respect the described data access policy (or use conditions).
ELIXIR-LU provides secure channels for the transfer of your data and host them in a GDPR-compliant computing environment.
If agreed, ELIXIR-LU also provides basic curation and re-pseudonymisation of data. We also store the metadata of the datasets in our data catalog to further improve findability of your data.


The data providers remain at all times responsible for the data that will be hosted on the ELIXIR-LU platform and for the validity of the data provision (data protection, ethics, etc.).

By default, the ELIXIR-LU Hosting Service Agreement is concluded for 10 years, to allow for re-use of data in research and dissemination of results.

The services of ELIXIR-LU are provided in principle free of charge and supported by Government of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and the University of Luxembourg.


How to submit data? – Step-by-step

  1. Contact our data steward regarding your data submission to discuss the agreement’s details.

  2. Review our Terms of Services (for data providers) and the Terms of Use (for data users).

  3. Select data access type: open or controlled (see description above).

  4. If you chose controlled access, provide us with the use conditions and restrictions that define the Data Access Policy by filling the Data Information Sheet.

  5. Sign the Hosting Service Agreement (see template here) with the Data Information Sheet attached as annex.

  6. Provide dataset description (additional metadata).

  7. Our data stewards provide secure data transfer channels and store the metadata in a GDPR-compliant manner.

  8. Your submission is being processed. You will get notified when your data is listed in the ELIXIR-LU Data Catalog.

Please consider that concluding the agreement may take several months. ELIXIR-LU can request additional documents (if applicable) which can be shared with data users to allow increased transparency and to demonstrate compliance with existing regulations:

  • template of an informed consent form used during data collection
  • supplementary cohort information
  • approval by respective ethics committee
  • de-identification procedure followed in case data is anonymised or pseudonymised

Checklist for preparing data files

To ensure quality, FAIRness and re-usability of data hosted by ELIXIR-LU, provider should ensure datasets comply with requirements stated below:

  • Use consistent and meaningful filenames reflecting the file content and following best file naming practices. The file names cannot contain spaces, accented or any other special characters except hyphen and underscore. (see the RDMkit guide on file naming)
  • Use meaningful self-explanatory names for variables following same principles as for file naming.
  • Use non-proprietary widely accepted file formats optimized for long term preservation and re-use.
  • Provide data dictionary listing all variables, their description and range of values. In case an de-identification operation was performed on the dataset, description of affected variables shall contain the information on how the new values were obtained (randomisation, irreversible pseudonymisation or other similar operation).
  • File checksums.sha256 containing SHA256 checksums for all files shall be included in the root folder. (see the FAIR Cookbook recipe on how to generate checksums)
  • Only dataset(s) described in provided Data Information SHeet (DISH) will be accepted.
  • README file (.md/.txt) is expected to be in the root folder describing folder structure, common variables, data source, etc. (see the RDMkit guide on what to write in README file)
  • If the Data Information Sheet (DISH) defines multiple datasets, these can be transferred using one transfer session (the same upload link). In this case, each dataset should be located in its own folder with respective checksum file, README file, data dictionary, etc.