Rules of use
Access to CHORUS comes with obligations. This is what you are agreeing to when you accept the terms of use.
Use the platform only for your approved project, only with the data and tools given to you, and let results out only through the export workflow. Do not share your account, do not work around the controls, and report anything that looks wrong.
The terms of use that bind you are published and versioned inside CHORUS, and you accept them there before you get access. This page explains what they cover so you know what you are agreeing to. Where the two differ, the version in the platform is the one that counts.
What the platform is for
CHORUS is a Secure Processing Environment for the governed analysis of sensitive data, within approved projects. Every rule below follows from that: the environment is not general-purpose computing that happens to be secure, it is a place where a specific, authorised piece of research is carried out.
What you agree to do
- Use CHORUS only for the approved purposes of the project you are part of.
- Stay within the project's authorisations - its ethics approval, its protocol, its transfer agreements.
- Work only with the datasets and tools provided in your workspace.
- Document your analyses reproducibly where the project requires it.
- Report anything wrong without delay - an anomaly, an incident, a dataset that seems to be available to the wrong people, a suspected breach.
What you must not do
- Attempt to reach workspaces, data or files you were not given.
- Extract, copy or transfer raw or re-identifiable individual patient data out of CHORUS.
- Work around the technical controls - the export workflow, network policies, logging.
- Share your credentials, or let anyone else use your account.
- Process data from CHORUS using outside tools or services that were not approved for it.
- Use the data commercially, or outside the project's scope, without explicit authorisation.
Data protection and confidentiality
You are bound by the data-protection law and the professional confidentiality obligations that apply to you - being inside a secure environment does not replace them.
Two duties follow in practice. Sensitive data leaves the environment only through the controlled export workflow. And you apply data minimisation: produce and keep only what the approved purpose actually needs.
Exporting results
Every release of results goes through an approval request submitted inside the platform. You describe the output; the principal investigator, or someone they have authorised, approves or rejects it. Where the disclosure risk is unclear, they escalate rather than decide alone. Every decision is recorded.
No paper form and no external process exists for this - see Exporting results.
Your account and your machine
- Keep your credentials confidential, and report any suspected compromise immediately.
- Do not disable or circumvent the platform's security mechanisms.
- The computer you use to reach CHORUS must meet your institution's IT security requirements. The environment is protected; the device you open it from is your responsibility.
Audit
CHORUS records the actions that matter - access, role changes, export requests and decisions. By using the platform you accept that this activity may be audited by those entitled to do so: your principal investigator, the platform's operators, a data protection officer, the body governing the deployment.
See Data access model for what is recorded.
Results and intellectual property
Rights over research results follow your institutional agreements and project contracts. CHORUS transfers no rights over the source data - it provides the governed environment the processing happens in, and nothing more.
Accepting the terms
You accept the current version of the terms of use in the platform before you get access. If a new version is published, you have to accept that one to keep your access. The history of acceptances is kept for audit.
Why "no outside tools" is stricter than it sounds
Pasting a table into an online service to make a chart, or into an assistant to help interpret it, sends that data to a third party outside every control the environment provides. It is the most common way sensitive data leaves a secure environment, and it rarely feels like a breach at the time.
This is why the tools you need are provided inside the workspace, and why the list can be extended on request. If something you need is missing, ask for it rather than working around its absence.