Policy on end of life procedures for ARCHER user accounts and projects

This page describes what happens when an account or project is no longer required on ARCHER, or a user leaves a project. These situations are most likely to come about during one of the following three scenarios:

1. The retirement of project (usually three months after project end)
2. A PI tidying up a project requesting the removal of user(s) no longer working on the project
3. A user wishing his/her own account to be removed

For each user account involved, assuming the relevant consent is given the next step can be summarised as one of the following actions

1. Removal of ARCHER account and deletion of all data from the account
2. The re-owning of the ARCHER account within an ARCHER project (typically to PI)

A user's right to use ARCHER is granted by a project. Our policy is to treat the account and associated data as the property of the user and it is the user's responsibility to ensure that any data they store on ARCHER or the RDF is handled appropriately.

A user may request their account be deleted or have its ownership transferred to the project.

A project manager may request an account be deleted, revoking the user's right to use the system. Users will be notified and given a period of 2 weeks to remove data from their account before it is finally removed.

A project manager may request ownership of an account be transferred to the project. The user will be given a time limit of 2 weeks to object to this transfer. If no objection is raised in this period the account ownership will then be transferred to the project. This is intended to cover the situation where an account owner is no longer in contact with the project and cannot request the transfer themselves.

When a project is due to end, the PI will receive notification of the closure of the project and its accounts 3 months before the accounts are closed and cleaned.

The above procedure deals primarily with ARCHER accounts. If a user also has data on the RDF then

1. if the ARCHER account is deleted, the user's RDF data is left intact and the user still has access to the RDF via the DTN nodes, administered via the SAFE and still remain part of the original ARCHER project
2. if the ARCHER account is re-owned then so is the RDF account and all its data