What's changed on the UKB-RAP: a guide for researchers

Since the UKB-RAP closed earlier this year, we have made a number of changes to how the platform operates.

These changes have been introduced to strengthen the safety and security of participants’ data. 

Click the links below for more details on these changes, along with supporting resources.

The reopening and strengthening of the UKB-RAP is an ongoing process. We will keep the below pages updated as we continue our work to improve the platform.

Last updated 10 November 2026

• Before UKB-RAP reopens you should log in to your AMS account. To increase security we’ve added multi-factor authentication (MFA) to AMS, and you’ll need to sign in to set it up before you can access the UKB-RAP. You can do this now - there’s no need to wait for the reopening.
  
  Read our MFA set-up guide.

• In the process of strengthening the platform, all researchers have been disconnected from their projects. Your projects, and all the data and work within them, are safe and unaffected.

• You will need to re-add researchers to each of your projects. You will only be able to do this after a researcher has reactivated their account by logging in.
  
  Watch our explainer video here.
  
  If you can't find a researcher when trying to add them, they may not have logged in and reactivated their account yet. Ask them to log in to the UKB-RAP, then try adding them again.

• You may wish to contact your project's Org Admin to confirm that they know they need to re-add you once you have logged in to reactivate your account.

• Changes to authentication mean that API tokens can no longer be used to log in to the UKB-RAP via the command line interface (CLI). Researchers can still use the CLI with username and password authentication.
  
  You will also be logged out after 15 minutes of inactivity and will need to authenticate again using Two Factor Authentication (2FA).
  
  Jobs and analysis will continue to run, even if you are logged out unexpectedly.
  

• Initially, you will not be able to download any files from the platform, including results. We are working to introduce a manual Output Checking System (OCS) with limited capacity to allow results to be downloaded. In 2027, we aim to have an automated OCS that allows researchers to take all of their results off the UKB-RAP.
  
  You can still create private applets, but you will no longer be able to build public apps, or share tools with researchers outside of your application. You will be able to export code once the OCS is operational.
  
  There is no change to uploads - you will be able to bring files and data into the platform without any additional checks. This position will be kept under review and may change.

• It will not initially be possible to refresh or dispense data; researchers will only be able to work with data already dispensed to their project.
  
  We hope to re-enable this soon and will update accordingly.

• Interactive tools such as RStudio and Jupyter are now available through isolated browsing.
  
  This provides an additional layer of security by separating the interactive session from your local browser. It may look similar to screen sharing, and researchers outside the UK may experience some additional latency.
  
  Read more on isolated browsing here.
  
  Interactive jobs will not have general internet access. Access to specific websites may be permitted where they have been whitelisted.
  
  Copying and pasting are also restricted: you cannot copy text from an interactive job, and pasted text is limited to 300 characters.

• The Preview tools are currently disabled. To view the contents of files or notebooks, you will need to launch a new compute instance.
  
  We are working to restore Preview functionality.

• You can no longer SSH into jobs, meaning you can no longer log in to a running job or view its logs from outside the UKB-RAP, whether through your browser or the command line interface (CLI).
  
  You can still access jobs from within the job itself.

• The way participant-level data are displayed in Cohort Browser has changed.
  
  You can no longer view a table of participant data or copy individual encrypted identifiers (EIDs) directly from Cohort Browser.
  
  You can still save your cohort and use the table exporter to export the filtered data as a CSV file.

• The command line interface (CLI) can no longer be used to directly navigate participant data in a tabular format. The relevant commands can still be used from within jobs running on the UKB-RAP, such as via ttyd.

• Whole genome sequencing (WGS) and whole exome sequencing (WES) CRAM files will not be available for any projects. This is a temporary measure while we put the necessary arrangements in place to support their continued availability. We hope to re-enable these data soon and will update accordingly.

• As an additional measure to strengthen safeguards against reidentification, restricted home location data fields will no longer be available. This is a permanent change. Researchers who have previously accessed these fields should please re-dispense their datasets as soon as possible, at which point the home location data will be removed.
  
  We apologise for the inconvenience this may cause. In the next data release, we intend to publish a field for home location at a UK region level, to replace the current data.