Data Access

If you are a recipient of a CLSA Data Access Trainee Waiver, congratulations! You join a cohort of over 250 trainees who have taken advantage of the CLSA’s valuable resources to further the field of aging research. There are several expectations and privileges involved.

1. The CLSA dataset requested must be for the sole use of the trainee project, i.e., the graduate student’s thesis research or the postdoctoral or clinical fellow’s research project.
2. You are encouraged to include this award in your CV. We recommend using the following language: “CLSA Data Access Trainee Fee Waiver [insert year], monetary equivalent CAN $4,000.”
3. Trainees must acknowledge receipt of a CLSA Data Access Trainee Fee Waiver in all resulting publications as follows, “[Name of trainee] was the recipient of a CLSA Data Access Trainee Fee Waiver.”

Graduate students (Masters or PhD) who wish to obtain the CLSA data for the sole purpose of their thesis, and postdoctoral or clinical fellows (limit 1 waiver per fellowship) who wish to obtain the CLSA data for the sole purpose of their postdoctoral or clinical fellowship project, who are enrolled at Canadian institutions for their graduate degree, postdoc, or clinical fellowship, can apply for a fee waiver. This fee waiver only applies to alphanumeric data. Any additional data requested, such as images and raw data, have associated fees. The trainee fee waiver cannot be applied to CIHR catalyst grant applications. Canadian trainees working outside Canada but funded through a Canadian source are also eligible for a fee waiver. The request for a fee waiver must be checked in Part 1 of the CLSA Data and Biospecimen Access Request Application in Magnolia.

Once you submit your CLSA Data and Biospecimen Request Application, you can track the progress of your application through Magnolia, the online application system. Once you have begun the application process, it is your responsibility to check your email (including your folders for junk, spam, etc.) for notifications from Magnolia. You may be contacted by the Data Access Team, if additional information is required.

You will be notified about the approval status of your application approximately three months after the submission deadline. If your application is approved, a CLSA Access Agreement must be negotiated and signed between McMaster University and your institution. This part of the process can take a variable length of time (up to an additional three (3) months) and is not under the control of the CLSA. You will also need to provide evidence of ethics approval for your project, if you had not done so within your initial application.

Once all parties have signed the CLSA Access Agreement, an invoice for the data access fees will be issued by McMaster Billing. After the payment has been received by McMaster University and proof of ethics approval has been received by the CLSA, your data will be released within 10 working days. Please be aware that these steps may affect the length of time that it takes for the data to be released to you. Please note that the release of additional data (images and raw data) will require more time (one to three months, depending on the request). When planning for your project, you must include in your timeframe at least six (6) months from the application submission deadline to the time you receive your dataset.

Yes. Please note that ethics approval is not required at the time of the application to use CLSA data, but no data or biospecimens will be released until proof of ethics approval has been received by the CLSA. Should your institution not require a full ethical review for the use of de-identified data, please provide a letter from your Institutional Review Board to this effect. Ethics approval must be obtained only from the primary applicant’s institution, not from all of the institutions of the members of the project team.

The CLSA DataPreview Portal has been designed to help researchers browse available variables in the CLSA dataset and find basic frequencies. Should you need additional information not available through the DataPreview Portal to determine the feasibility of your proposal, please contact us at access@clsa-elcv.ca. We can provide simple cross-tabulations (of two or three variables) from cross-sectional data. While we do our utmost to respond to data queries to help potential users ensure that their proposal is feasible, please note that we are not resourced to provide statistics on change across time-points or more in-depth statistical support.