Collaborating in Yoda

Yoda allows you to collaborate with both internal and external researchers and others you work with within your project, and with different types of access (read, write, and so forth). Before adding any collaborators to your research group, make sure you can verify the identity of the person behind the email address and check if this person is legally allowed to access the data.

Access roles in Yoda

• Read-only: person who can only view and download the files and folders in the research group, but not modify, delete, or upload files.
• Read and write: person who can view, download, upload, modify or delete files and folders in the research group.
• Group manager: person who has read and write access, and can add and remove members to and from the research group and determine their access type (read-only, read and write, group manager).

Giving other researchers access to your research group

If you are a group manager in your research group, you can grant access to others to the research group. Note that you cannot give access to subfolders, only to the main folder!  

1. Log into the Yoda web portal of your Yoda environment.
2. Click the yellow button with your email address in the top right corner of the screen. In the menu that is shown, select 'Group manager'.

3. In the ‘Groups’ pane of the Group Manager, on the left side, you can see the research groups that you have access to. You can switch between tree view and list view. Navigate to your group or use the search bar to find and select your group.

4. Once selected, you will see information about your research group on the right. Under 'Group properties' you will find general information about the research group. Under 'Group members' you will see a list of the people that have access to your data.

5. Select 'Click here to add a user...’ and enter the email address of the person you want to add. The address must contain only lowercase letters, numbers, hyphens, underscores, or dots. If the email address is not known by the system, you will see '(create)' behind the email address. Click on the email address that is shown to you, then click ‘Add’.

If the new user is an internal collaborator, they will be able to log into Yoda with their institute credentials. If external collaborators are unable to select a home institution at the prompt "login via SURFconext", they can select "eduID (NL)" instead of an organisation, and subsequently create a personal account. This short video shows how to login the first time. On older Yoda services, external collaborators will first receive an email to set their password, after which they can login to Yoda.

6. By default, a new user will obtain read-write access. You can change that if needed (read the instructions in the next chapter).

Change or revoke access

In the Group manager in the Yoda web portal, you can see which role a person has through the icon besides their email address. If you have the role of Group manager, you can change the roles of other users or delete them from the research group:

1. In the Yoda web portal, go to Group manager, and select your research group.
2. In Group members, select the person for whom you want to change the access level.
3. Select the role you want to assign to this person, or select Remove member(s) if you want to revoke access to the research group.

Please note: if more than one group manager is present, group managers can also change their own role (to Viewer or Member). But once this is done, the group manager will lose the group manager rights and will not be able to add, change or remove users from the research group anymore. The last remaining group manager will not be able to demote themselves however, to make sure that every group will have at minimum one group manager.