This page describes what happens when an account or project is no longer required on Cirrus, 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 one month after project end for projects of up to 12 months duration, two months for longer projects)
  2. A Principle Investigator (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

A. Removal of Cirrus account and deletion of all data from the account B. The re-owning of the Cirrus account within an Cirrus project (typically to PI)

A user’s right to use Cirrus 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 Cirrus 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 one month (or two months for projects of greater than 12 months duration) before the accounts are closed and cleaned.