TREvolution

Build trust

We’re ensuring transparency, accountability, and security so that researchers, data custodians, and the public have confidence in how sensitive data is accessed and used for research.

See also:

Adopt Standards Enable Federation Accelerate Research

Trust is the cornerstone of sensitive data research. Without it, collaboration stalls, public confidence weakens, and the potential of data is left unrealised.

TREvolution is working to strengthen governance, security and transparency so that confidence is earned and maintained throughout the research process. This includes making decision-making processes open, ensuring accountability through oversight, and providing channels for feedback. It also means assuring Trusted Research Environments (TREs) that interactions with other environments are safe, underpinned by agreed governance frameworks and shared protections.

For researchers, this means clearer, fairer systems that support their work and remove unnecessary barriers. For data custodians, it means being confident that they can collaborate securely with other Trusted Research Environments (TREs) without putting the data they hold at risk. And for the public, it means knowing that their data is safeguarded, used responsibly and delivering benefits for society.

Trust must extend in all directions: between environments, from institutions to researchers, and most importantly, with the public whose data enables research in the first place. By embedding co-production, openness, accountability and security, TREvolution is building trust, ensuring that stakeholders and the public are involved and can participate with confidence.

As technologies and expectations change, TREvolution will continue to consult widely, renewing stakeholder feedback and building trust as a living, evolving principle at the heart of research.

Standardised Architecture for Trusted Research Environments (SATRE)

The SATRE specification provides a standard framework for Trusted Research Environments (TREs). It incorporates knowledge and best practices from multiple institutions and sectors across the UK. This includes all aspects of TRE provision such as information governance procedures, computing technology, data management and other capabilities.

It aims to standardise the capabilities of TREs, making it easier for users, operators, and developers to work with sensitive data, and making TRE operations more transparent to data owners and the public. By having a common standard, SATRE aims to build trust between TREs, enabling them to trust each other and to operate within a federated network since they all share common operating principles.

Five Safes RO-Crate

The “Five Safes RO-Crate” digital object is a proposed approach for packaging the metadata needed for exchanging research requests and results between analysis tools and TRE providers, enabling them to operate Five Safes-compliant processes.

RO-Crate is a community effort to establish a lightweight, web-native approach to packaging research data with their metadata. It has become a widely adopted framework for inter-service exchange, resource archiving, and reproducible reporting, used by many digital research infrastructures and their services. The Five Safes RO-Crate is a specialised profile of RO-Crate whereby encapsulated elements and metadata provide the necessary context for evaluating the safety and appropriateness of both data access and analysis.

In packaging all the metadata together, it can help provide a transparency layer about what was approved, where the analyses were run and the outputs of the project.

Communications and Public Involvement and Engagement (PIE)

Communications and PIE ensure TREvolution activities are transparent, inclusive and aligned with stakeholder and public expectations. With structured engagements, Public Advisory Groups and clear messaging delivered through diverse channels, we gather insight from researchers, data custodians and the public to inform the adoption of standards, governance and technical solutions. This approach builds confidence, strengthens accountability and ensures that TREvolution delivers trusted and publicly acceptable outcomes.

UPDATES

Latest news, events, and opportunities relevant to building trust.

EVENT

Drop-in session: DARE UK real-world research exemplars funding call (23 October 2025; 11-12pm)

23 Oct 2025

BLOG

Young people share their thoughts on the future of sensitive research data

15 Oct 2025

BLOG

SOAR: Making research output checking faster and safer

3 Oct 2025

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Meet the Teams

Explore the teams focused on building trust.

ALL TEAMS

University of Dundee

University College London

University of Manchester

University of the West of England

University of Nottingham

Research Data Scotland

Outputs

Discover TREvolution outputs relevant to building trust.

Latest

Manual

This TREvolution profile gives an overview of the new capabilities the SATRE specification will develop during the TREvolution project to produce an updated specification.

University of the West of England University of Dundee University of Nottingham University of Manchester Swansea University

Publication

University of Manchester

Specification

SATRE provides a Standard Architecture for Trusted Research Environments (TREs), incorporating knowledge and best practices from multiple institutions and sectors across the UK.

University of Dundee

ALL OUTPUTS

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