Cohort and Longitudinal Studies Enhancement Resources (CLOSER)
The UK is home to the world’s largest and longest-running longitudinal studies.
Cohort and Longitudinal Studies Enhancement Resources (CLOSER) aims to maximise their use, value and impact both at home and abroad.
Bringing together eight leading cohort studies, the British Library and the UK Data Archive, CLOSER works to stimulate interdisciplinary research, develop shared resources, provide training, and share expertise.
A central component of CLOSER is the development of a metadata discovery platform, CLOSER Discovery, that is providing a portal to hundreds of thousands of variables, questions, and data collection instruments from across the CLOSER portfolio of studies.
The portal:
- Holds cohort metadata covering survey and biomedical data collection, including detailed information on survey questions, instruments and variables, and the links between them.
- Categorises those metadata according to standardised naming conventions, including classification by subject or topic.
- Uses the DDI-Lifecycle international metadata standard, which is designed to mark-up cohort and longitudinal studies.
- Provides links within and across the studies’ metadata, enabling researchers to see whether a question has been used more than once within a study, or by multiple studies.
- Allows users to produce a list of variables and directs them to where they might obtain the data.
A beta version was launched late 2015, and the live version early in 2017. Work is ongoing to add more questions, measures and variables from the main cohort and longitudinal studies.
The second strand of work concerns ensuring that the harmonised work packages created as part of CLOSER are systematically described and archived at the UK Data Service.
Our contribution
Principal Investigator: Alison Park, Centre for Longitudinal Studies
Co-Investigator: Louise Corti, UK Data Service
Manager USP: Veerle van den Eynden, UK Data Service
Funders: Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), Medical Research Council (MRC)
Project dates: October 2012 - September 2019