Sharing Data with an External Collaborator
Northwestern researchers often collaborate with colleagues at other institutions. Efficient data sharing is critical to the success of these projects.
Only share data with authorized collaborators and store it on approved platforms. For example, make sure your collaborators use services approved by their universities or by Northwestern. See Protecting the Sensitive Information in My Data for details.
Data Sharing Using Northwestern Storage Systems
See the table below for how to share data outside of Northwestern.
How to Share Data With External Collaborators Using Northwestern Storage Systems| How to Share Data With External Collaborators Using Northwestern Storage Systems | ||
|---|---|---|
| Service | Methods | |
| OneDrive | Share individual OneDrive files and folders with any email address. Anonymous sharing is disabled. Note: You cannot share more than 50,000 files at a time. |
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| SharePoint |
Enable external sharing when you request a SharePoint site. To turn external sharing on for an existing site, request an update to your SharePoint site; in the Additional Comments field, provide the site name, site owners, and a request to enable external sharing. After enabling external sharing, you can: |
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| RDSS | To give external collaborators access to an entire RDSS share, request a Northwestern NetID for them. Then ask the RDSS share owner to add the collaborator to the read or read‑write group. Note that the collaborator will have access to all data stored in the share. To share specific files or folders with a collaborator, create a Globus shared collection to allow collaborators to transfer data from RDSS to their institution. |
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| FSMResFiles (for Feinberg School of Medicine) | Contact the Feinberg School of Medicine IT to request access for your collaborators. | |
| Quest Storage | To give external collaborators access to your compute and data resources on Quest, request a Northwestern NetID for them and grant them access to your allocation. For details on managing permissions for specific files or folders on Quest, see File Systems, Storage, and Permissions on Quest. If the external collaborator does not need access to your Quest compute resources, you can share specific files or folders through a Globus shared collection. This does not require your collaborator to have a Northwestern NetID. |
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| Public Cloud storage |
Public cloud platforms do not require Northwestern‑specific credentials for collaborators.
To share data from a cloud platform:
The exact process will vary by platform and service. For example, see our tutorial on Granting Access to an Amazon S3 Bucket Using Access Keys. Alternatively, for data stored in Amazon S3, external collaborators can transfer the data to their institution via a Globus shared collection. |
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Globus Guest Collections
Globus supports efficient data transfers and lets Northwestern researchers share data with anyone who has a Globus account by using guest collections. See the Sharing Data section of our Globus documentation for details about which Northwestern collections allow guest collections and instructions for sharing using Globus.