Workspace Questions

In compliance with the 21st Century Cures Act and for transparency with All of Us Research Program participants, All of Us discloses the identities of researchers who have access to the All of Us data.

Your first and last name, institutional affiliation, role, researcher bio, and link to your professional profile, if provided, will be displayed on the Research Project Directory of the Research Hub. Aspects of your workspace description will also be displayed on the Research Projects Directory. Read about writing your workspace description.

Note: this information will also be posted on the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us site to comply with the 21st Century Cures Act.

Depending on their access level, registered researchers are able to access the Registered Tier dataset and the Controlled Tier dataset within the Researcher Workbench.

• The Registered Tier contains individual-level data and currently includes data from electronic health records (EHRs), wearables, surveys, and physical measurements taken at the time of participant enrollment. These data have been altered to protect participant privacy.
• The Controlled Tier requires a registered researcher to complete an additional training prior to gaining access. This additional step is required since the Controlled Tier includes genomic data, additional demographic information from EHRs, and survey answers that are suppressed or generalized in the Registered Tier, and therefore, need additional security in place to protect participant privacy.

Read the participant privacy protections for additional information, including the differences between what data are included, generalized, and suppressed in the Registered Tier and Controlled Tier.

When creating a new workspace in the Researcher Workbench, you can select which data access tier you want to access for your workspace (i.e., Registered Tier or Controlled Tier).

Note: Workspaces created using Controlled Tier data can only be shared with other researchers with access to the Controlled Tier dataset.

Read about creating a workspace for additional information on selecting your data access tier and dataset version.

Because different tiers have different access rules and data features, duplicating a workspace from one tier to the other is not allowed.

In most cases, notebooks written using Registered Tier data will work in the Controlled Tier, but some modifications may be required. You can find detailed instructions on how to duplicate a workspace in our Managing Workspaces article.

All data tied to your workspace will be deleted and will not be able to be recovered.

Note: If you delete a shared workspace, you will be deleting this workspace for everyone collaborating on the workspace. Read more information about managing workspaces, including deleting, sharing, and duplicating workspaces.

No. You can only share workspaces utilizing the Controlled Tier dataset with researchers who are approved to access the Controlled Tier dataset.

To gain access to the Controlled Tier dataset, the researcher’s institution needs to have provisioned access to that specific tier and the researcher must complete an additional training step.

You are capable of copying files from one workspace notebook to another workspace’s workspace bucket. You are also able to copy files from one workspace bucket to another workspace bucket in a different workspace using gsutil.

Read additional information about copying, renaming, and moving objects using gsutil.

Note: The workspaces must share the same data tier access level. For example, you can only access bucket files derived from Controlled Tier workspaces using another Controlled Tier workspace.

The All of Us Researcher Workbench is a cloud application. Each workspace has a permanent storage area called the “workspace bucket” within the Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Notebooks are loaded in an ephemeral virtual machine and are synced to the “workspace bucket.” Researchers can use the workspace bucket to save files needed for analysis.

The workspace bucket is attached to your workspace, if you delete the workspace, you delete the bucket. If you share the workspace with your colleagues, you will share the workspace bucket.