Custodianship in health research
Custodians carry obligations that do not transfer with a data copy: consent terms, national law, institutional policy, and accountability to the people the data describes. That is why mature custodians increasingly refuse to distribute datasets and instead offer governed access — researchers come to the data, use it under supervision, and take away only approved results.
Custodian-centric architecture
Federated research infrastructure is built around the custodian: each institution runs its own environment, sets its own access rules, and sees every query made against its data. In Lifebit’s federated TRE deployments, data remains under local custodianship throughout — the platform’s job is to make that custody compatible with large-scale, multi-site science.
Related terms
Data Sovereignty · Five Safes Framework