Application Questions

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. Please be aware that these steps may affect the length of time that it takes for the data to be released to you. Once all parties have signed the CLSA Access Agreement and proof of ethics approval has been received by the CLSA, your data will be released within 10 working days. 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.

Should you encounter any issues completing the online application, please contact us via access@clsa-elcv.ca.

The goal of the CLSA is to enable data access as widely as possible, however, an application for data access can be denied. There may be some instances when an applicant is asked to revise and resubmit an application at the recommendation of the Data and Sample Access Committee (DSAC). To avoid applications being sent to the DSAC that are not appropriate, we try to work with interested researchers before the application is submitted, to provide them with information about the available data and feasibility of a project. During the application process itself, we ask applicants to correct errors and omissions and provide feedback from the DSAC review, so that applicants can clarify or revise and resubmit a proposal. Failure to provide the level of detail sufficient to assess the study feasibility could lead to the application being not approved.

Data access applications are now being accepted for Follow-up 2 (FUP2) alphanumeric, physical assessment and cognition data. Please check the CLSA Data Availability Table for current data availability that may be requested as part of a data access application.

No, simply having trainees as part of the project team does not satisfy criteria for eligibility for a fee waiver.

Currently the charge for partial cost recovery per application is $4,000 CAD for applications within Canada and $10,000 USD for international applications. This includes access to the Baseline, Follow-up 1, Follow-up 2, or all three datasets. Due to the additional work required to make some data research ready, additional fees apply for access to image files, raw data, and datasets that require more complex customization. Please see the table of additional fees under Data Access. The fees are payable for the retrieval and preparation of the dataset per approved project, not for each project team member.

No, you do not need to secure funding before applying to request CLSA data. If funding has been requested, but not yet approved, please provide the name of the funding agency in the appropriate section of the application. If your project is approved, and once the CLSA Access Agreement has been signed, the CLSA financial administrator will contact the primary applicant with the invoice for payment of the fees.

Evidence of peer-reviewed funding will be considered evidence of scientific review for data access applications. You must provide proof of the peer-reviewed funding for the specific project in your application. If there are no plans to submit an application for financial support for your project, or if it is a trainee project, please provide evidence of peer review (e.g., internal departmental review; thesis protocol defense, etc.) if available. Awards of funding not specific to the proposed project (i.e., student fellowships) are not considered proof of peer review. If no evidence of scientific peer review is provided with the application, the project will undergo scientific review by the Data and Sample Access Committee.