IBL — International Brain Laboratory

Overview

The International Brain Laboratory is a global consortium of approximately 20 experimental and theoretical neuroscience laboratories that operates under an explicit policy of releasing all collected data and code publicly. Founded in 2017 with support from the Simons Foundation and Wellcome Trust, IBL was designed from the outset as an open science collaboration, with data sharing as a core structural commitment rather than an afterthought. Its flagship output, the Brain Wide Map, provides the first brain-wide atlas of neural activity during a standardised decision-making task, fully released on DANDI Archive in NWB format.

Open Science Commitments

• All experimental data is released publicly on DANDI Archive in NWB format.
• All analysis code is released on GitHub under open licences.
• Standardised task, hardware, and surgical protocols are shared openly to enable cross-lab reproducibility.
• Several projects pre-register analyses before data collection.

Key Outputs

• The IBL Brain Wide Map (2023) is a brain-wide electrophysiology atlas released on DANDI Archive, covering Neuropixels recordings from 547 brain regions.
• The standardised IBL task protocol is freely available for adoption by other labs.
• PyBpod and ONE (Open Neurophysiology Environment) provide an open data access API.
• The IBL conducted a reproducibility study that replicated a single experiment across 9 labs to quantify inter-lab variability.

Connections

• Data archived on: DANDI Archive

Resources

• https://www.internationalbrainlab.com
• https://dandiarchive.org/dandiset/000409 (Brain Wide Map on DANDI)
• https://github.com/int-brain-lab