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Perspectives

Curated overviews of the open neuroscience ecosystem, organised by open science practice, research context, geography, and data modality.

Open science practices

Cross-cutting workflows for making research open, applicable across regions and data types.

  • Sharing your data: a step-by-step guide from consent and data formatting through repository selection and deposit registration.
  • Reproducibility: open science infrastructure for reproducibility, from pre-registration and protocol sharing through to computational provenance.
  • Open access publishing: the routes, licences, policies, and infrastructure for making publications openly available, from Plan S and research-assessment reform to repositories and journal vetting.
  • Data Discoverability: metadata standards, persistent identifiers, and registries for findable and locatable research data.
  • Study Registration and Data Management: pre-study registration, data management planning, and the funder mandates that require them.

Research contexts

The distinct open-data landscape of specific research areas and sub-domains.

  • Clinical Trials: regulatory data standards, mandatory trial registration, and individual patient data sharing for clinical research.
  • Health: the regulatory constraints on health data, the access models used in practice, and the interoperability standards that enable secondary use for research.
  • Preclinical and animal research: the shared and distinct open-data infrastructure for animal neuroscience, the major open animal datasets, and the coverage gaps that remain.
  • Rare Disease and Phenotyping: phenotyping standards and variant curation infrastructure for rare neurological disease research.
  • Ontologies: the controlled vocabularies that describe what neuroscience data records about the world, from anatomy and cell type to phenotype and disease.

Geographical

Open science infrastructure and policy by country or region.

  • Australia: national research data infrastructure and Australian participation in international open neuroscience.
  • Europe: EU-level open science mandates and pan-European research infrastructure, relevant to all Horizon Europe-funded research.
  • France: the French national open science policy framework, life sciences research infrastructure, and health data governance.
  • Germany: the national research data infrastructure initiative and contributions to open neuroscience from German institutions.
  • Global South: the representation gap in global open neuroscience data and the initiatives working to address it.
  • Japan: the national brain mapping programme and genomic data infrastructure.
  • Netherlands: the formulation of the FAIR Principles and the early institutional open data policies that shaped the field.
  • North America: NIH BRAIN Initiative-funded open data platforms and the Canadian federated open neuroscience infrastructure.
  • Belgium: Belgian life sciences infrastructure (VIB/ELIXIR-BE), NERF and the Neuropixels electrophysiology hardware ecosystem, and the Mission Lucidity neurodegenerative disease consortium.
  • Scandinavia: Nordic neuroscience infrastructure spanning Norway (NORBRAIN/KISN), Sweden (SciLifeLab/HPA), Finland (FinnGen), Denmark (NRU Copenhagen/Public-nEUro), and Iceland (deCODE).
  • Sweden: SciLifeLab national life science infrastructure, the Human Protein Atlas, the Swedish National Data Service (SND), and Swedish open science policy.
  • Switzerland: Swiss simulation neuroscience (Blue Brain Project / Open Brain Institute), ELIXIR-CH (SIB), and the Swiss Personalized Health Network.
  • United Kingdom: UK open access policy, NHS-linked health data infrastructure, and the neurodegenerative disease research network.

Data modalities

Standards, repositories, and governance by type of research data, aligned with the vault’s domain/ tags.

  • Cognition: the more fragmented open data landscape for cognitive and behavioural research, including annotation vocabularies and paradigm-sharing infrastructure.
  • Electrophysiology: open data standards and repositories for electrophysiology, from EEG and MEG to invasive neurophysiology recordings.
  • Genomics: the pipeline from raw sequencing reads to single-cell expression data, with the formats, archives, and governance relevant at each stage.
  • Biosamples: the biobanks, material transfer agreements, and sample catalogues that govern physical biological material, and how it connects to the data derived from it.
  • Bioimaging: the open bioimaging ecosystem from file format standards to federated national and European infrastructure.
  • Computational: computational neuroscience models, morphological reconstructions, and the simulation platforms used to develop and share them.
  • Neuroimaging: the open neuroimaging ecosystem, with strong standardisation, a broad repository landscape, and landmark open cohort datasets.