Inviting Users
Study access is granted per study, by invitation. Adding someone sends them an email invitation and gives them a role on your study only — it does not touch their access anywhere else.
Where: Settings → Users
Who can invite
| You are | You can invite |
|---|---|
| Admin or Sponsor | Anyone, in any role, on any site in the study |
| CRA | Uploaders only, and only onto the sites you are assigned to |
| Any other role | Nobody — the Users page is not available |
See Roles and Permissions for what each role can do once they are in.
Invite someone
- Go to Settings → Users and open Add Users to Study.
- Fill in the row:
- Email — the address the invitation is sent to. This becomes their sign-in username.
- Name — optional.
- Role — see choosing a role below.
- Sites — only appears for Uploader and CRA. Other roles get the whole study.
- To invite more than one person at once, click Add User to add another row. Each row is its own person, role, and site list.
- Click Add Users to Study.
You get one confirmation per person — Invite sent to <email>. If a row fails, it is
reported separately with the reason, and the rows that succeeded are still sent. Fix the
failed row and submit again.
Choosing a role
Grant the narrowest role that lets someone do their job:
- They send imaging and nothing else → Uploader
- They read studies and write reports → Reader
- They monitor sites and bring uploaders on → CRA
- They need oversight of the study, including access management → Sponsor
- They run the study → Admin
- They only handle invoices → Billing
A person can hold different roles on different studies. To change what someone can do on this study, change their role here rather than inviting them a second time.
Site assignment
Uploader and CRA are scoped to sites — they only see and act on the sites you select, and at least one is required. Every other role covers the whole study, and the site selector does not appear.
If a site is missing from the list, add it first under Settings → Sites.
What the invited person receives
They get the standard Brainstorme invitation email, which takes them to the new portal to set a password and sign in. From there:
- They should register a passkey if they will e-sign reports — see Signing in with a Passkey.
- If they already have a Brainstorme account, the invitation adds this study to the account they already have. They sign in as usual.
- If they used the old portal and have never signed in to the new one, point them at Moving to the New System first.
Changing a role or removing access
From the same Users page, open the user's row:
- Change their role to widen or narrow what they can do. The change takes effect on their next sign-in — ask them to sign out and back in if they are mid-session.
- Remove them from the study to revoke access entirely. This removes them from every site in this study at once; their history stays in the audit log.
Both actions are recorded in the audit log, with who made the change and when.
What a CRA can and cannot do
A CRA is a site-scoped manager, so the platform holds them to their own sites:
- They may invite uploaders, and no other role — not admins, sponsors, readers, billing, or another CRA.
- Every invite they send must name at least one site, and every site must be one of theirs.
- They may only change or remove a user whose sites are all within their own. A user who spans a site they do not cover is out of reach.
These limits are enforced by the platform, not just hidden in the interface — an invitation outside a CRA's reach is refused.
Troubleshooting
"You can only invite users to your own sites" — you are a CRA and the row named a site you are not assigned to, or named no site at all. Pick one of your own sites.
The invitation never arrived — ask them to check spam, and confirm the address in the Users table is the one they actually use. Re-sending is safe; it does not create a duplicate account.
They sign in but see nothing — they are probably in the wrong study, or their role does not include the screen they are looking for. Check Verifying your access.