Data Sharing for Computational Neuroscience

Abstract

Computational neuroscience is a subfield of neuroscience that develops models to integrate complex experimental data in order to understand brain function. To constrain and test computational models, researchers need access to a wide variety of experimental data. Much of those data are not readily accessible because neuroscientists fall into separate communities that study the brain at different levels and have not been motivated to provide data to researchers outside their community. To foster sharing of neuroscience data, a workshop was held in 2007, bringing together experimental and theoretical neuroscientists, computer scientists, legal experts and governmental observers. Computational neuroscience was recommended as an ideal field for focusing data sharing, and specific methods, strategies and policies were suggested for achieving it. A new funding area in the NSF/NIH Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience (CRCNS) program has been established to support data sharing, guided in part by the workshop recommendations. The new funding area is dedicated to the dissemination of high quality data sets with maximum scientific value for computational neuroscience. The first round of the CRCNS data sharing program supports the preparation of data sets which will be publicly available in 2008. These include electrophysiology and behavioral (eye movement) data described towards the end of this article.

A Digital Repository and Execution Platform for Interactive Scholarly Publications in Neuroscience

“…Dataspace allows users to find and share neuroscience data while the Software Center allows users to find, research and download software tools. The Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience (CRCNS) website provides for the sharing of tools and data including physiological recordings from sensory and memory systems and eye movement data (Teeters et al, 2008). Similarly, the German Neuroinformatics Node (G-Node) is a web portal for data access, data storage and data annotation focusing on cellular and systems neurophysiology data (Herz, et al, 2008).…”

“…Metadata are often scattered (Teeters et al, 2008). Data analysis and reproducibility require all of this information in a single, structured and organised file.…”

COORDINATE-BASED META-ANALYTIC SEARCH FOR THE SPM NEUROIMAGING PIPELINE - The BredeQuery Plugin for SPM5

“…which do not want to share or exchange the experimental data (Ascoli, 2006). Researchers have expressed concerns that sharing of data can lead to unfair use (Teeters et al, 2008). However, data sharing is an important current issue in neuroscience (Kennedy, 2007;Liu and Ascoli, 2007) and it is believed that broad data sharing could lead to breaktroughs in our understanding of brain function (Van Horn and Ball, 2008).…”

The International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility: Evaluating the First Years

“…All three active programs have a focus on the establishment of international standards, which is by definition an activity that cannot be done at a national level. Moreover, neuroscience is lagging behind compared to other biological fields in formulating international standards for nomenclature (Bug et al 2008) or for describing experimental data (Teeters et al 2008) or models (Cannon et al 2007;De Schutter 2008).…”