Stale Project Review

Background

The Women & Children’s Health Research Institute (WCHRI) has been managing an installation of REDCap since late 2009. In that time we have created more than 7,000 individual projects in the system. Most of these contain data for legitimate research projects, but many were created for demonstration or testing, and some were for studies that never went ahead. Less than half of all projects have been moved to Production status in REDCap. Of these, a significant number have been completed and published, but others may have been abandoned.

Starting with our standard REDCap install we will perform a review of all ‘stale’ projects. This review will:

• Ensure that we have appropriate documentation for each project.

• Ensure that the REDCap project status is set appropriately for the project.

• Tidy up and remove old and unwanted projects.

Based on the university's document retention policy we're defining a stale project as any project that has had no activity logged in the previous 7 years.

Review Process

For each stale project, we will attempt to identify the project’s PI or owner based on:

1. WCHRI’s REDCap project request database

2. The PI listed in the REDCap project record (only for some project types).

3. Contact information for users with setup rights in the project.

After the initial review we will contact project owners for a decision on how to proceed. Options will include:

• Deletion

• Archival (by the PI / owner)

• No action

Additional information on how to proceed with deleting a project can be found on our End of Study and Archival Policy page.

Instructions on creating a backup (or archival copy) of a project can be found on our Backup a REDCap Project page.

Additional information regarding our Backup Policy can be be found under Policy and Procedure in the navigation menu (or by clicking the respective link contained herein).

Orphaned Projects

An orphaned project is any project that has been inactive for more than seven years and does not have a PI or owner that is contactable and responding to project related communications.

Orphaned projects will be deleted.