Frequently Asked Questions

The Alzheimer’s Disease Data Initiative (AD Data Initiative) is on a mission to fundamentally transform Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias research. We offer researchers around the world secure data sharing and analytics tools and collaboration resources, all available to users at no cost.  Learn more about the AD Data Initiative. 

• Current platform partners seeking to bring new data sets to their platforms
• Current platform partners seeking to add existing data sets to the AD Workbench
• Researchers and organizations seeking to add new data to the AD Workbench
• Researchers and organizations seeking to integrate additional platforms to the AD Data Initiative and AD Workbench
• Opportunities to enhance or fill gaps in data sets including enabling broader demographically representative datasets
• Data-science projects that use and highlight the capabilities of the AD Workbench
• Data Use Agreement templates to ease access for new contributors

AD Workbench is the secure, cloud-based ADRD data sharing, analysis, and interoperability layer of the AD Data Initiative technical suite. Researchers can create an account, request a workspace, and begin searching Alzheimer’s disease and ADRD datasets in a few steps.

Learn more about AD Workbench here.

Anyone can explore the AD Discovery Portal and register for an AD Workbench account, and qualified researchers or data scientists can input or analyze data in AD Workbench.

The registration process is automatic, permissions for data and workspaces are not automated and includes a review process.

Users can search, analyze, and manage existing datasets; save their work; upload and share new datasets and code; and allocate their workload to a virtual machine.

If datasets made available via AD Workbench are used during the analysis, it is required to cite them separately. Please refer to the respective data use agreement or contact the respective data owners for the specifics of the citation information.

Data owner information can be found in the metadata section of the dataset on the AD Discovery Portal.