Welcome to the UK Data Service

This UKRI-wide policy updates and harmonises the organisation’s expectations for responsibly managing and sharing research data. Experts from the UK Data Service helped to shape the policy for researchers and organisations, to provide greater consistency and clarity to existing expectations.

In this issue of the UK Data Service newsletter, we highlight two new Horizon Europe-funded projects: AI4Social+ and CDIF4EOSC. Plus, learn more about our four new computational social science data skills modules and explore our successes within the latest annual report.

We’re pleased to announce the launch of the UK Data Service Dissertation Award for the 2026–27 academic year. Undergraduate students who are writing dissertations on social science topics and have used data accessed from the UK Data Service, may enter for a chance to win £300 and publicity via our organisation.

We are pleased to announce the publication of our Annual Report 2025–26. Within, we reflect upon a significant year for the Service and celebrate progress made across data infrastructure, access, curation, skills, partnerships and future-facing developments across the research data landscape.

We're excited to announce the launch of a new series of Computational Social Science Data Skills Modules. These modules, which are free to access, are designed for social science data service professionals and social science researchers looking to develop foundational knowledge in emerging areas of computational social science.

Are you an early career researcher or analyst in the academic or VCSE sector? Does your research use data in the UK Data Service collection? If you would like support to develop your ideas alongside a £3,500 award to help fund development, we invite you to apply for the next round of our Data Impact Fellows scheme.

Are you an early career researcher or analyst in the academic or VCSE sector? Does your research use data in the UK Data Service collection? If you would like support to develop your ideas alongside a £3,500 award to help fund development, we invite you to apply for the next round of our Data Impact Fellows scheme.

The Evidence for Equality National Survey (EVENS) was developed to close the ethnicity data gap. EVENS is a landmark survey designed to better understand the lived experiences of ethnic and religious minority people during a period of unprecedented social change: the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our new 'local communities in data' impact theme brings together UK Data Service-enabled research, case studies, blog posts and data resources to explore how national datasets are used to understand and strengthen local communities. The theme focuses on three connected lenses: place, people and safety.

Watch and learn all the latest data skills from our free webinars, training and video tutorials.

Learn more about the fundamentals of synthetic data, including what synthetic data is and is not, plus watch a live coding demonstration in Jupyter notebook demonstrating methods in Python for generating synthetic data of various forms.

This free online workshop focuses on the use of the free and open-source cross-platform QGIS GIS application, to create maps and other geographical visualisations from the 2021/22 census data provided by the UK Data Service.