Disseminating your ONS LS research results

When you want to disseminate your LS results beyond your research team you must obtain Publication clearance.

Items cleared for publication could be reports, journal articles, presentations, abstracts or perhaps a set of results which are destined to be worked up as any of these. Complete a Request for SRS: Output from ONS LS Project form (Word) and send it with a copy of your work to celsius@ucl.ac.uk, allowing 5 working days for clearance.

Publication clearance reduces the risk of disclosure and ensures that the LS is properly described. Key criteria include:

  • Results aggregated to a minimum cell threshold. In results from which a count of individual persons could possibly be calculated - e.g. percentages, or graphs based on percentages - that count is 10 or more. However, clearance may be considered for results which do not meet this criterion if there is a scientific justification.
  • The LS is described correctly (standard descriptions are available).
  • ‘Source: ONS Longitudinal Study’ is added to tables and figures, where appropriate.
  • Results appreciate that the LS includes data for England and Wales only.

Publication clearance is done by one CeLSIUS User Support Officer and one member of the LS support team at ONS and can take a bit longer than pre-publication clearance. Once your output has been cleared for public release you may disseminate it multiple times without resubmitting it for clearance, providing no new results/no new interpretation of results are included.  

You are asked to acknowledge the support of CeLSIUS and ONS in your publications and include a disclaimer. We have a suggestion below:

The permission of the Office for National Statistics to use the Longitudinal Study is gratefully acknowledged, as is the help provided by staff of the Centre for Longitudinal Study Information & User Support (CeLSIUS). CeLSIUS is funded by the ESRC under project UKRI/ES/B001046/1. The authors alone are responsible for the interpretation of the data.

All statistical results remain Crown Copyright and should be acknowledged as “Source: ONS LS”. 

We also ask researchers to note that all statistical results remain Crown Copyright, and should be acknowledged either as such and/or as “Source: ONS”. 

The following copyright statement should be featured along with the above acknowledgement:

This work contains statistical data from ONS which is Crown Copyright. The use of the ONS statistical data in this work does not imply the endorsement of the ONS in relation to the interpretation or analysis of the statistical data. This work uses research datasets which may not exactly reproduce National Statistics aggregates.