October 2020 As a supplement to the Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology’s (FCSM) 2020 Research and Policy Conference held last month, FCSM and the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics (COPAFS) hosted an eight-session webinar series on confidentiality and federal data access between June and October. The series focused on managing data privacy concerns while providing ample access to researchers. “For researchers who use federal data, this series elucidates specific issues that they may come up against when trying to access these data and may provide a path forward for submitting a data request to federal agencies,” said COPAFS Executive Director Paul Schroeder. The series included the following webinars:
Video recordings of the webinars are publicly available on the COPAFS website: https://copafs.org/fcsm/confidentiality-data-access-webinar-series/. FCSM is an interagency committee dedicated to improving the quality of federal statistics. It was created by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to inform and advise OMB and the Interagency Council on Statistical Policy on methodological and statistical issues that affect the quality of federal data. COPAFS represents researchers, educators, public health professionals, civic groups, and businesses that rely on the quality and accessibility of statistics that can only be effectively collected by the federal government.