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Privacy, ethics, and data use

The Learning Variability Network Exchange (LEVANTE) is designed to enable coordinated data collection around measuring children’s variability within and across individuals, groups, and cultures. The goal of the LEVANTE Data Repository (LDR) is to serve as a centralized repository for the standardized datasets generated via this framework, and to allow for the open sharing and reuse of these data. The greater the accessibility of the dataset, the higher its value to the community. Our policies are designed to foster this goal while mitigating potential risks involved in creating an open developmental dataset. 

Individual sites will be responsible for their own ethical approval from their research institutions and/or governmental bodies and will contribute only fully de-identified data, which will be released to the community on an annual schedule. Access to these core data will be granted pending agreement to the terms of the LEVANTE Data Repository Data Use Certification.

LEVANTE Data Repository:
contribution and access policies

Data submission policies 

• All data on core LEVANTE measures must be shared in the LDR under the LEVANTE Data Submission Agreement (DSA). Core measure data will become available as part of scheduled LDR releases.
• All shared data are certified by the submitters to be compliant with institutional requirements (including ethical approval) and de-identified. 
• All publications funded by LEVANTE contain relevant linkages to the LDR and analytic code to reproduce findings. 
• All data from supplemental measures outside of the core LEVANTE measure set should be shared as detailed in the partner’s original proposal and should be deposited in the appropriate repository by no later than one year after termination of the award. 

Data use policies 

• All users of the LDR must agree to the Terms and Conditions in the LEVANTE Data Use Certification (DUC) to gain access to LDR data. 
• All data must be used only for research and education purposes. 
• Data users must certify that all relevant ethical and human subject (if applicable) approvals have been obtained. 
• Data users must not seek to re-identify participants. 
• Data users must reference LEVANTE release IDs in their publications and are encouraged to post code for reproducibility purposes. 

Learn more about LDR data submission and use

Document version 1 – 29 April 2024