REDCap

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REDCap at the University of Melbourne

REDCap (Research Electronic Data Capture) is a secure, web-based research data collection system, available for use at the University of Melbourne free of charge. If you are unsure if REDCap is suitable for your research study, please consult the University's Research Data Management System Finder, the vendor's official FAQ, and/or look through some of the relevant research literature.

The University REDCap instance is located at https://redcap.unimelb.edu.au.

Requesting Access:

You can apply for either a personal University REDCap user account or a temporary trial account via the request a REDCap user page. Researchers outside of the University are eligible for limited-access accounts only, and must be sponsored by a full-access user.

Support and Training:

REDCap has a range of instructional videos that give an overview of many of its features.

If you have a question about REDCap at the University, first see if it is addressed by our FAQ page or in our collection of how-to guides. For other technical queries (including any regarding system access, two-factor authentication, database design and implementation, unexpected system behaviour, or other trouble-shooting) please contact our support team at red-cap@unimelb.edu.au. Please note, due to the REDCap licence terms, technical support can be offered only to University of Melbourne staff, honoraries, and students.

For system-agnostic queries about study design, statistical analysis, or similar, please instead fill in the contact MISCH request form.

MISCH administers quarterly workshops for beginner- and intermediate-level REDCap users. The full list of available workshops can be found on the MISCH training resources page. Researchers outside of the University can still sign up for the training workshops, and will be supplied with a temporary login for the session.

For more information see also the REDCap consortium page.

Citations:

Study manuscripts using The University of Melbourne REDCap instance for data collection and management must acknowledge The University as follows: "Study data were collected and managed using REDCap electronic data capture tools hosted at The University of Melbourne"

If you make use of any other MISCH services, citations in any scientific papers and reports that result from research projects supported by MISCH are expected to include wording such as the following: "AUTHOR(S) would like to thank MISCH (Methods and Implementation Support for Clinical and Health research platform), for the administrative and technical support that greatly facilitated this research."

Availability:

System availability is targeted to be 99.9%.

Planned outages for software upgrades and systems maintenance are scheduled roughly every 6 months, typically in February and August. We contact all current REDCap users via email at least 10 business days before an outage is scheduled, with the aim of selecting a date and time that inconveniences the fewest users possible. If a critical security fix is released for REDCap or any of its supporting software, we will schedule an emergency downtime, aiming to provide a minimum of 2 business days' advance notice if at all possible.

In the event of an unplanned outage, some data loss may occur i.e. records entered on the day of the fault arising.

Disclaimers

  • Data Custodianship:
    Clinical Investigators retain accountability for data custodianship, including conformance to the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research.
  • Access to REDCap projects:
    For each REDCap project, it is the responsibility of that project's owner(s) to manage the access rights of any other users, both internal and external to the University. The only time when a system administrator will grant access to a given project is if all listed owners have left the University, and even then only after a consultation with the REDCap academic lead.
  • Compliance:
    It is the responsibility of the researcher to comply with all Australian State and Federal legislation - and this includes the use of person identifiers, privacy legislation and data protection laws. For international studies, further compliance may be necessary. University of Melbourne employees must conform to University of Melbourne Research Policy. Please see Management of Research Data and Record Policy (MPF1242) and related policies. Please see https://www.legislation.gov.au, https://www.nhmrc.gov.au, and https://www.australianclinicaltrials.gov.au for additional resources. REDCap is a free, secure, web-based application designed to support data capture for research studies. The system was developed by a multi-institutional consortium initiated at Vanderbilt University.
  • Data Retention Compliance:
    The REDCap repository is not designed for long-term data retention. At the end of a study it is the researcher’s responsibility to conform to retention of data guidelines by archiving data outside of REDCap.
  • Project and Data Backup:
    It is the researcher’s responsibility to ensure backups of their project settings and data are performed and maintained, at intervals determined appropriate for the project. The storage of the project metadata and data are to be kept secure by the researcher and the researcher retains accountability for the data retention and custodianship.
  • Compliance notes with specific relevance to questionnaire design:
    • Identifiable Data: Where data collected is person-identifiable, Privacy Legislation applies.
    • Ethics and Consent: Regardless of legislation, in research involving humans, you should always try to implement the best practicable mechanism of informed consent, reflected in your questionnaire and project designs. Please see the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research.
    • Good Clinical Practice (GCP) guidelines validated and adhered to for Therapeutic Good Administration (TGA) Trials: It is the responsibility of the researcher to ensure that their research study collection forms for all all TGA clinical trials that have human subject participants, adhere to and validated against the GCP guidelines.
    • Medicare Id: The Australian Medicare Id is constrained by specific legislation and its use for secondary uses of data (research) is NOT permitted.
    • US FDA 21 CFR Part 11: REDCap is not compliant to this standard.
    • EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR): REDCap is not fully compliant, but can be configured on a per-project basis to comply with Article 17 (Right to erasure).
    • US HIPAA regulations: REDCap can be configured to comply; however, the compliance of our instance has not been verified. It is the responsibility of each researcher to ensure that their study complies with HIPPA regulations, if applicable.