ERDA: external collaboration

To protect against unauthorised access to research data, ERDA separates access at user- and project-level.

For this reason, external access to ERDA requires approval by an AU-contact. This process is integrated in ERDA Peers, where you can specify which external users will need to access ERDA.

As an AU employee, there are two ways to invite external partners to become ERDA Peers:

1. Fill in the details of the external users under Peers and send them an invitation from ERDA. In this case, the external partner will be sent a link to a pre-filled sign-up form, to fill out email and password themselves.
2. The external users can sign up to ERDA after which you can approve their user creation. In this case, the external partner will be sent a link to a empty sign-up form, to fill out themselves.

Use Labels to keep track of your peers. Please note that the field does not accept spaces.

Use Show Peers to manage external contacts and send a new invitation.

Use Expire to set an expiration date for peer's access. The access is always limited to a year to avoid inactive accounts. After the expiration date, approve the peer again or update their information.

Use either Enter Peers or Import Peers to update the expriation date. Enter the peer's information and click Update in the Action menu.

To work with research data in a structured manner in a group, we recommend sharing files for collaboration via shared folders, to ensure that all participants work on the same copy. 

In teaching situations, participants often need to take a copy of the material away with them. ERDA can meet this need in the following way:

• Create a folder for the concrete research data
• Share the folder with a read-only share link
• Share the URL or ID of the link with the participants

By importing the share link from the right-click menu in ERDA Files, the participants can now download a copy of the research data.

• In the right-click menu under Import, the participants must enter either the URL or ID of the share link.
• Finally, they must click OK to copy the contents of the share link to their folder.