CASD via cascad

The Centre d’accès sécurisé aux données (CASD) provides remote secure access to confidential French administrative and statistical microdata (INSEE, DGFiP, ministries, etc.). Data cannot leave the secure environment, and no replication package can therefore contain the data.

cascad (Certification Agency for Scientific Code and Data) is a French certification agency, backed by CNRS and HEC Paris, that verifies the computational reproducibility of research and issues a certificate describing what was reproduced.

How verification works

• The researcher’s project must already have been approved for access to the relevant data (through the Comité du secret statistique). This is usually satisfied when the authors have submitted to a journal.
• The project must have an active CASD access - this can be reactivated.
• While the researcher can request a cascad verification, it is more usual to have the verification requested by the journal. The journal needs to know the researcher’s project name and any special conditions.
• cascad requests approval for a clone of the researcher’s project from the Comité du secret statistique. This usually takes about two weeks.
• The certifier runs the code inside the CASD environment, compares the output to the manuscript, and produces a certificate and a report.
• The report is provided to the journal’s data editor.