Cookie policy

This page outlines the cookie policy for the UK Research and Innovation (‘UKRI’, ‘we’, ‘us’ or ‘our’) website. Your use of this website is subject to our terms of use.

When we provide services, we want to make them easy, useful and reliable. This sometimes involves placing small amounts of information on your device, for example, your computer or mobile phone. These include small files known as cookies. They cannot be used to identify you personally.

Cookies are used to improve services for you, for example by:

  • enabling a service to recognise your device so you do not have to give the same information during one task
  • recognising that you have already given a username and password so you do not need to enter it for every web page requested
  • measuring how many people are using services, so they can be made easier to use and that there is enough capacity to ensure they are fast.

You can learn about cookies and how to manage them (All About Cookies).

For further information on cookies used by this website please contact us.

Email: web@ukri.org

Cookies used on our website

Cookie Control panel cookies

CookieControl

Purpose: to hold setting on whether to allow cookies to be stored or not

Expires: 1 year

Google Analytics cookies

Our website uses Google Analytics. It installs cookies to help us identify errors and accurately estimate visitor numbers. These cookies do not collect personal data about visitors to our website.

_ga

Purpose: used to distinguish users.

Expires: two years

_ga_HPSM59M7J4

Purpose: used to find and track an individual session with your device.

Expires: 400 days

_gat_UA-150290826-1

Purpose: used to throttle the request rate – limiting the collection of data on high traffic sites.

Expires: one minute

_gat_UA-102208639-1

Purpose: used to throttle the request rate – limiting the collection of data on high traffic sites.

Expires: one minute

_gid

Purpose: used to distinguish users.

Expires: 24 hours

Siteimprove cookies

nmstat

Purpose: to help record the user’s use of the website to improve the user experience on the website.

It is used to collect statistics about site usage such as when the visitor last visited the site.

It is also used to track the sequence of pages a user looks at during a visit to the site. This information can be used to reduce user journeys, and enable visitors to find relevant information quicker.

This Siteimprove Analytics cookie contains a randomly generated ID used to recognize the browser when a visitor reads a page. The cookie contains no personal information and is used only for web analytics.

Expires: 1000 days

AWSALB / AWSALBCORS

Purpose: to ensure that all page views for the same user session are sent to the same endpoint. This enables us to determine the sequence of a user’s page views needed for features like Behaviour Tracking and Funnels.

Expires: seven days

Hotjar Cookies

Hotjar is a technology service used by UKRI that helps us better understand our users’ experience. For example:

  • how much time they spend on particular pages
  • which pages they spend most time on
  • which links they choose to click
  • what users do and do not like.

This enables us to build and maintain our service with user feedback.

Hotjar uses cookies and other technologies to collect data relating to our users’ behaviour and their devices. This includes:

  • screen size
  • device type (unique device identifiers)
  • browser information.

Hotjar stores this information on our behalf in a pseudonymised user profile.

Hotjar is contractually forbidden to sell any of the data collected on our behalf.

Relating to the user

_hjSessionUser_{site_id}

A Hotjar cookie that is set when a user first lands on a page with the Hotjar script. It is used to persist the Hotjar User ID, unique to that site on the browser. This ensures that behaviour in subsequent visits to the same site will be attributed to the same user ID.

Expires: 365 days

JSON

_hjHasCachedUserAttributes

A cookie that enables Hotjar to know whether the data set in _hjUserAttributes Local Storage item is up to date or not.

Expires: session

Boolean true/false

_hjUserAttributesHash

A cookie that enables Hotjar to know when any User Attribute has changed and needs to be updated.

Expires: 2 minutes, extended every 30 seconds

Hash

_hjUserAttributes

A local storage item that stores User Attributes sent through the Hotjar Identify API.

Expires: no explicit expiration

Base64 encoded JSON

hjViewportId

A session storage item that stores the user viewport details such as size and dimensions.

Expires: session

UUID

hjActiveViewportsIDs

A local storage item that stores the user active viewports IDs.

Expires: stores an expirationTimestamp that is used to validate active viewports on script initialization

JSON

Relating to session

_hjSession_{site_id}

This cookie holds the current session data. It ensues that subsequent requests within the session window will be attributed to the same Hotjar session.

Expires: 30 minutes, extended on user activity

JSON

_hjCookieTest

This cookie is used to check if the Hotjar Cookie Tracking code can use cookies. If it can, a value of 1 is set in this cookie. The data stored in _hjCookieTest is deleted almost immediately after it is created.

Expires: under 100ms duration, cookie expiration time set to session duration

Boolean true/false

_hjLocalStorageTest

This cookie is used to check if the Hotjar tracking script can use Local Storage. If it can, a value of 1 is set in this cookie. The data stored in _hjLocalStorageTest has no expiration time, but it is deleted almost immediately after it is created.

Expires: under 100ms

Boolean true/false

_hjSessionStorageTest

This cookie is used to if the Hotjar tracking script can use Session Storage. If it can, a value of 1 is set in this cookie. The data stored in _hjLocalStorageTest has no expiration time, but it is deleted almost immediately after it is created.

Expires: under 100ms

Boolean true/false

_hjTLDTest

When the Hotjar script executes, we try to determine the most generic cookie path we should use, instead of the page hostname. This way cookies can be shared across subdomains (where applicable).

To determine this, we try to store the _hjTLDTest cookie for different URL substring alternatives until it fails. After this check, the cookie is removed.

Expires: session

Boolean true/false

Relating to feedback tool

_hjShownFeedbackMessage

A Hotjar cookie that is set when a user minimises or completes incoming feedback so that it will load as minimised immediately if the user navigates to another page on which it is set to show.

Expires: 365 days

Boolean true/false

Additional cookies for UKRI funding service users

We use the following cookies to track usage and authenticate users in our new funding service for applicants.

Tracking cookies

These cookies are deployed if the user accepts cookies.

allow_all_cookies

Purpose: to track whether you have accepted our cookie policy. It is automatically cleared every 30 days.

Expires: 30 days

_gid

Purpose: used by Google Analytics to track users’ journeys through the service to improve their experience.

Expires: one day

_gat_UA_XXXXXX

Purpose: used by Google Analytics to limit the amount of data recorded by Google on high-traffic-volume websites.

Expires: one minute

_ga

Purpose: used by Google Analytics to uniquely identify users.

Expires: two years

Strictly necessary cookies

These cookies are required for the service to operate and are always used.

ukri-tfs-local-session

Purpose: to authenticate users on our service and allow them to remain signed in.

Expires: 25 minutes

Last updated: 6 March 2024

This is the website for UKRI: our seven research councils, Research England and Innovate UK. Let us know if you have feedback or would like to help improve our online products and services.