Castellum - A Data Protection-Compliant Web Application for the Subject Management of Human Science Studies

Abstract

Research institutions, especially in the human sciences, have been confronted with strict guidelines for the processing of personal data since the European General Data Protection Regulation came into force in 2018. This presents them with new challenges in recruiting and managing study participants and processing the associated data. To meet these challenges, Castellum has been developed at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development since 2016 and has been used successfully since May 2020. Castellum is a turnkey open-source web application for the data protection-compliant management of volunteer data. Among other things, Castellum simplifies study recruitment, appointment management and study implementation. Various institutions have expressed interest in Castellum in the recent past. On the one hand, this may be due to the fact that no comparable open source project exists. On the other hand, Castellum was explicitly designed to be so flexible and expandable that it can be adapted to the workflows and processes of other research institutions with relatively little effort. The use of Castellum has so far been particularly successful for institutions that conduct several studies in parallel, that want to proactively recruit participants from an internal pool of people interested in the study, and that generate data when dealing with these subjects. Since Castellum is subject to the AGPL licence, the software may be used free of charge without restrictions.