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Submitting Data

To submit data to GHGA, please contact us by completing the Pre-Submission Inquiry, which collects general information about the planned submission, or by reaching out directly via the GHGA Helpdesk. A GHGA Data Steward will be assigned to your submission and guide you through the following four steps:

Flowchart with icons showing the four-step GHGA data submission process: Pre-Submission Inquiry, Data Processing Contract, Metadata Preparation, and File Upload – as described in the text below.

  1. Filing a Pre-Submission Inquiry or contacting us via the GHGA Helpdesk
    • A short, informal first contact: you tell us about the planned submission, and GHGA lets you know whether it can be supported and assigns a Data Steward to guide you through the rest of the process.
  2. Agreement of a Data Processing Contract with GHGA Central
    • The legal step that establishes GHGA as a data processor for your institution. Covers identifying the Data Controller, reviewing and signing the contract (or, for DKFZ scientists, the Internal Terms of Use), and the information GHGA needs to prepare a sign-ready version.
  3. Preparing the Metadata for submission
    • How to describe your samples, experiments and datasets using the GHGA metadata model, and how that metadata is transpiled and validated before submission.
  4. Submitting the Research Data Files
    • How to get access to an upload box, generate the Crypt4GH keys needed to encrypt your files, and upload them using the GHGA Connector.

Signing of the Data Processing Contract has to be finalized before a Data Steward is allowed to interact with your non-personal metadata or set up an upload box for your Research Data Files. Preparing the metadata itself, however, can already start on the submitter side in parallel with the contract signing — the two steps do not have to happen strictly one after another.

Note on Submission Service

Limitations on External Submissions - June 2026

The GHGA Data Portal was launched in summer of 2024. Since then, substantial improvements have been made, including support for data uploads from external users. Current development focuses on further enhancing metadata handling and streamlining the submission workflow to provide a scalable, user-friendly experience suitable for national operation.

At present, submissions from external users outside the GHGA Consortium still require some manual processing and therefore cannot yet be fully supported at scale. If you are interested in submitting data, please refer to our FAQ and the corresponding user story.