About

What is OpenSAFELY Airlock?

Airlock is a service running inside the secure environment to allow researchers to view output files, create release requests, and for output checkers to review and release these requests.

Researchers use the Airlock UI to view their workspace files, create a new release request, add their files to the release request, provide context information and description of applied statistical disclosure controls, and submit the files for review.

Output checkers review the files requested for release, and approve or request changes for each one. Once a full review of all files has been completed by two output checkers and all filees are approved, an output checker can release the files to the Jobs site.

Airlock allows us to enforce some safety controls and policies automatically. This includes things such as the number of required reviews, independence of reviews, and ensuring that researchers who are also output checkers are not able to review their own requests.

Accessing Airlock

Airlock is only supported in Chrome

Please ensure you use Chrome when accessing Airlock. Features may not work as expected in other browsers.

To access the Airlock system, you will need to obtain a single user token via the Jobs site, which you can use to login in Airlock in Chrome in the relevant backend.

For more details, see the section on how to access Airlock

Workflow and permission

As a release request progresses through the construction, submission and review stages, the actions that you are allowed to perform on a request or on files within a request changes.

For example, a researcher creates and constructs a release request, and then submits it for review. After submission, the researcher can no longer edit the request. Output checkers now have access to the submitted request and can review and approve or request changes to files. They may then return the request to the researcher with comments. At this stage the request can now be edited by the researcher, and the output checkers no longer have permission to change their decisions on files or to add comments.

Refer to the reference documentation on Airlock workflow and permissions for a more detailed description.

Using the documentation

Airlock's documentation has three main sections:

The how-to guides provide practical steps for working with Airlock to create and process release requests. These are additionally subdivided into guides for researchers and guides for output checkers.

The explanation section provides background information about Airlock and its features.

The reference section provides background information about working with Airlock.