1. Project Ownership and Oversight

REDCap projects are “owned” by the Principal Investigator* (PI) and the PI is responsible for managing the project. This includes:

• Ensuring the project complies with all applicable regulations and policy including, but not necessarily limited to, privacy legislation in the jurisdictions in which data is collected, conditions imposed by relevant ethics boards and data custodians, and University of Alberta (UAPPOL) policies.

• Managing and overseeing study staff.

  • Ensuring that study staff are appropriately supervised and are qualified and trained for their roles in the project.

  • Ensuring that REDCap user roles and responsibilities are appropriately managed and that end users’ project privileges are revoked when they leave the study team.

  • Ensuring that personal identifiers are only collected in the REDCap project when approved by the REB. See important information about identifiers below.

*Under certain approved circumstances the study PI may be a collaborator at another institution. When this is the case we generally require a local investigator to take responsibility for oversight of the study database.

2. Allowed Users

Our REDCap installation is licensed for use by University of Alberta researchers and their collaborators. External users are allowed access to University of Alberta REDCap systems, but these users should not normally be granted setup rights within a project.

3. Project Management Lifecycle

Moving Projects to Production

REDCap includes features that protect data integrity and facilitate compliance.  However these features only apply if the project lifecycle is appropriately managed, specifically:

• Live data should not be collected while the project’s REDCap status is “Development”. Projects must be “moved to production” once testing is complete and before data collection commences.

• Beginning in 2026 REDCap administrators will apply a development limit of 100 records to all new projects. This limit will be removed automatically once the project is moved to production.

• If a project requires a large data volume for testing purposes the principal investigator can email the helpdesk to request an exception.

Project Completion

REDCap is not an archival system and study data cannot remain in the system indefinitely.

• Investigators should download their data from REDCap once the project is complete. Downloaded data may be saved and archived in compliance with University of Alberta policy regarding research record data retention. Following completion and data download the project should be deleted from REDCap.

4. Stale and Orphaned REDCap Projects

Legacy data stored in the REDCap system represents a technical debt and has the potential to become both an administrative burden and a privacy risk. Stale and orphaned projects may be subject to deletion by REDCap system administrators. This includes:

• Projects that have had no activity logged for more than five years.

• Projects with no active end users

REDCap administrators will attempt to contact study PIs prior to project deletion. However projects that have seen no activity in the preceding five years may be deleted without notice.

See also: Stale Project Review

5. Identifiers

Beginning in 2026 all new projects will be reviewed for identifiers. Any project that appears to contain direct identifiers will require the Principal Investigator to complete an online privacy declaration before the study can be moved to production. This will require the PI to either justify the collection of identifiers or remove them from the project. The completed privacy declaration will be retained on file.

Existing projects may be spot-checked for identifiers. PIs for production projects that are collecting identifiers will be required to complete a privacy declaration as above.