NFDI Neuroscience
Overview
NFDI Neuroscience (NFDI-Neuro) is the neuroscience consortium of the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI), building sustainable research data management infrastructure for the German neuroscience community. Established within the NFDI association founded in October 2020 and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), the consortium comprises 10 applying and 15 participating institutions distributed across Germany. Its work addresses community-identified barriers to open science: lack of data and metadata standards, absence of provenance tracking methods, and insufficient privacy-preserving infrastructure for sensitive data. NFDI-Neuro operates in formal partnership with EBRAINS and links national German RDM infrastructure to European neuroscience data sharing networks.
Community and Scope
Community workshops and a monthly webinar series on neuroscience RDM have run since 2019. A survey of the German neuroscience community conducted in 2021 and published in eNeuro (2023) documented RDM needs across subdisciplines including neuroimaging, electrophysiology, and molecular neuroscience, and directly informed the consortium’s infrastructure priorities. NFDI-Neuro develops standards, tools, and training materials while building interoperability between national platforms and international initiatives.
Connections
- relatedTo: EBRAINS (formal partner for FAIR neuroscience data infrastructure; RDM work co-developed with EBRAINS AISBL)
- relatedTo: G-Node (German Neuroinformatics Node, one of the three co-leading institutions)
Resources
- https://nfdi-neuro.de
- https://doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0215-22.2023 (community survey, eNeuro 2023)
- https://doi.org/10.1515/nf-2020-0036 (NFDI-Neuro: building a community, 2021)
- https://www.nfdi.de/consortia (NFDI consortia listing)