CDD Vault not only enables teams to collaborate on their scientific objectives within their organization,
CDD Vault is the ideal platform to share your data and workspace privately and securely with external
parties such as contract research organizations (CROs). Using the very same platform with which you are
familiar, your organization can share data with CROs and/or invite CROs to contribute data assets to your
CDD Vault. CDD offers what you need from project management to optimizing collaborations in real time
and even across different time zones. The steps to adding a CRO and sharing data with the CRO are
outlined below.
Here are the steps:
1) Vault administrators: To add a CRO as a member of your vault, go to your Vault Settings tab. Click on the Vault sub-tab and select Members from the left side panel. Click on the link in the upper right to add a new member. For more details about adding members to your Vault, please see:
Adding, Removing and Editing Vault Users.
2) Now that the CRO is a member of your Vault, with a specific Vault User Role (refer to the User Roles and Privileges in this CDD user role matrix), it will be necessary for you to add your CRO as a member to a project. This may be an existing project or a new project that you create. By default, this member is restricted from seeing any data in your Vault of which they are not a project member.
a. For an existing project: you simply want to share all existing data within a project with your CRO – Go to Vault-->Projects, expand the project you wish to add them to, click on the Add/Edit link and then click Add a member. Add them as a member of the existing project by selecting his/her name from the drop down box that appears. Recall that only vault administrators or users with Manage permission for the project can add users to the project. If you wish to also allow your CRO to edit data within the project, check the "Edit Data" Checkbox.b. Create a new project: you may wish to maintain some level of restricted access to the data in your current projects by curating a subset of the the data to make available to your CRO. In this case, you will want to create a new project to store this subset of data. Upon creating this new project, be sure to follow the steps above to add this Vault member to this project.
3) By creating a new project, you’ve enabled yourself the ability to make visible to your CRO only a subset of data from your Vault (e.g., compounds that the CRO will be testing). Sharing select data from an existing project to a new project created within your Vault is simple through the CDD interface using the Data Import Wizard. Your options are to do this through a list of compounds, one compound at a time or via a list of compound plates. For more detailed directions on how to share a set of compounds with your new project, please refer to the following Knowledge base articles:
a. My compounds are already in the vault. How can I share some of them with a new project?b. My compound plates are already in the vault. How can I share some of them with a new project?
4) Your new project is now populated with compounds, so you are now ready to have your CRO import data into your Vault by creating Protocol Definitions. To get your CRO started with creating a new protocol, please refer to Setting Up a New Protocol in our Knowledge Base. Refer to 3: Importing Single-Point Screening Data for a guided tutorial on importing data. Optional: you also may wish to share protocol data stored in your Vault to aid in the CRO’s experimental efforts in this newly created project. The first order of business here will be to Manage project access of the protocol you would like to share in this new project. Head to the Protocols tab on the Explore Data page, click on the Protocol Name and on the left side panel, click on the Manage project access link. Add the new project to share this protocol with the new project. Once you’ve given project access to the protocol, you can re-import the original import files from specific runs that contain the project compounds of interest or create a new import file of curated data.
5) If at any time you wish to restrict your CRO from having access to the data within the CRO project, you can move the data out of the one project into another project that the CRO cannot access. You also have the option to remove their access to the project or to your Vault entirely with the reassurance that the data stays private and secure without any loss of data if you choose to remove this member from your Vault.
