The Medical Research Council in the UK annually invests around £700 million of public money in research, the primary output of which is data.

To maximise the research opportunities from this diverse quantity of data, the Council has a data sharing policy. The Council's Data Support Service project aims to enhance the data sharing capabilities of population and patient-based studies.

To facilitate sharing, the Council has set up a Research Data Gateway, a prototype service for discovering MRC-funded studies and their datasets and variables.

All users of the gateway can:

• Discover cohort studies and their data collection events
• Find their procedures for data sharing

Registered users can also:

• Search and browse for variables of cohort studies
• Select and export variables to support a data sharing request