Global South

Open neuroscience infrastructure is concentrated in Western Europe, North America, Australia, and Japan. Researchers and populations across Africa, Latin America, South and Southeast Asia, and the Middle East are largely absent from global neuroimaging repositories, which overwhelmingly represent populations of European ancestry. This limits the generalisability of neuroscience findings, skews the clinical tools and AI models built on the data, and perpetuates inequity in who benefits from open brain science.

The representation gap

A 2020 analysis found that people of African descent make up fewer than 5 percent of participants in brain-disorder research, despite Africa holding over 12 percent of the global population. Major open repositories such as the Human Connectome Project and UK Biobank draw almost entirely from European-ancestry cohorts, and similar gaps exist for Latin American, South Asian, and Southeast Asian populations. As a result, decades of open neuroscience data are of limited use for research on conditions as they manifest outside the Global North.

Several barriers compound the gap:

• data localisation policies that restrict cross-border transfer in several African countries
• variable or still-developing research ethics infrastructure
• limited access to neuroimaging equipment
• limited local computing and storage resources

Closing the gap

A range of organisations and frameworks work across regions to make Global South neuroscience data open and reusable, addressing the governance, capacity, and discovery barriers in turn:

• BRIDGE (Brain Research International Data Governance & Exchange) builds an International Data Governance Framework to help investigators, institutions, and repositories navigate the legal and ethical barriers to cross-border sharing. Wellcome-funded, hosted by INCF, with partners across Brazil, South Africa, Switzerland, the UK, and the US.
• UNESCO Open Science Recommendation (2021) is the global normative framework for open science, calling for equitable access and capacity building, and recognising linguistic diversity as a core feature.
• Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication (2019) calls for research to be shared and assessed in all languages, and for national-language publishing infrastructure to be protected.
• GA4GH carries explicit equity commitments in its genomics data-sharing frameworks.
• FAIR Principles are being reinterpreted in African and Latin American contexts to account for data sovereignty, localisation, and community benefit.
• ABDN (African Brain Data Network) connects over 300 researchers across more than 20 African countries to make African brain imaging FAIR. Kavli-supported; runs the African Brain Data Science Academy.
• IBRO (International Brain Research Organization) coordinates over 100 neuroscience societies worldwide and runs training and capacity-building programmes focused on lower-income countries.
• ALBA Network advocates for equity and inclusion across global neuroscience, addressing structural barriers that affect scientists from underrepresented regions.
• Neuromatch provides open computational-neuroscience training reaching researchers across Africa, Latin America, and South and Southeast Asia.
• RDA (Research Data Alliance) runs working groups on FAIR data in low- and middle-income country contexts.
• Open Neuroscience (open-neuroscience.com) is a community-led, multilingual database of open-source neuroscience hardware, software, tools, and repositories, designed for global accessibility.

Africa

Africa has the most developed open-neuroscience infrastructure in the Global South, though it remains concentrated in Nigeria and South Africa:

• CAMERA (Consortium for Advancement of MRI Education and Research in Africa), founded in 2019 and coordinated from the MNI, builds sustainable MRI access across the continent through local capacity building.
• AfNiA (African Neuroimaging Archive), CAMERA’s data-archiving arm, aggregates and openly shares brain MRI from across the region, starting in Nigeria and expanding toward Ghana and Ethiopia. Its first public release moved African neuroimaging from near-total absence to a small but growing openly shared body of data.
• H3Africa built the continent’s broader open-data infrastructure in genomics — a data archive, a bioinformatics network, and biorepositories in Nigeria, Uganda, and South Africa. The African scholarship on data sovereignty and community benefit it produced now shapes how the FAIR Principles and GA4GH frameworks are applied in African settings.
• Society and training bodies sustain the research base these efforts depend on: the IBRO Africa Regional Committee, the Society of Neuroscientists of Africa, TReND in Africa, the African Mental Health Research Initiative, and ALMA (African Leadership in Measuring brain health for children and Adolescents).

The first openly shared African neuroimaging datasets are recent (2024–2025):

• BraTS-Africa — brain-tumour MRI from six Nigerian centres; the first annotated open brain-imaging dataset from an African population, distributed via The Cancer Imaging Archive.
• Labeled Clinical-MRI dataset of Nigerian brains — structural MRI from 88 participants (healthy controls, age-related dementia, Parkinson’s disease), hosted on BrainLife.io.

Latin America

Latin American populations are substantially under-represented in global neuroimaging resources, and the region’s open-neuroscience infrastructure is concentrated in a few institutes and consortia working on dementia and brain health across diverse, admixed populations. Regional research and education networking is coordinated through the Latin America and the Caribbean Consortium on Dementia (LAC-CD) and supported by the Global Brain Health Institute (GBHI), with much of the open-data output flowing through the institutes and consortia below.

• CNEURO (Centro de Neurociencias de Cuba) coordinates the Cuban Human Brain Mapping Project, an open multimodal dataset of 282 participants combining high-density EEG, MRI, and cognitive testing, distributed through a dedicated LORIS instance and the CONP using DataLad. It has also released the qEEGt quantitative-EEG toolbox as open-source code.
• BrainLat (Latin American Brain Health Institute), at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Chile, is a dementia and brain-health institute that produces open multimodal datasets from across the region and runs implementation-science and training programmes. It is affiliated with GBHI and works in partnership with the ReDLat consortium.
• ReDLat (Multi-Partner Consortium to Expand Dementia Research in Latin America) studies the genetic and social determinants of Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia across Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and the US, collecting harmonized genomic, neuroimaging, clinical, cognitive, and socioeconomic data. Its open neuroimaging output is released through BrainLat.

Other regional research networks operate alongside these without yet maintaining open-data infrastructure of their own, including the UK-Latin America Brain Connectivity Research Network (affordable EEG-based dementia biomarkers across Colombia, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and the UK) and the Language and Brain Health Network. National open health-data systems are most developed in Brazil, whose DATASUS and OpenDataSUS portals publish machine-readable mortality, hospital, and disease-notification records that include neurological condition codes, and in Chile and Argentina, where funder data-management mandates are still maturing.

Notable open datasets

• The BrainLat dataset is a multimodal collection from 780 participants across Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru (530 patients with Alzheimer’s disease, behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia, Parkinson’s disease, or multiple sclerosis, and 250 healthy controls), combining anatomical MRI, resting-state fMRI, diffusion-weighted MRI, and high-density EEG. It is one of the first regional open collections pairing high spatial-resolution and high temporal-resolution recordings across multiple neurodegenerative diseases, produced by BrainLat and ReDLat and distributed through the Synapse platform under a data use agreement.
• The Cuban Human Brain Mapping Project, produced by CNEURO, combines high-density resting-state EEG, MRI, and cognitive testing from 282 participants and is openly available through a LORIS instance in the MNI ecosystem.

South and Southeast Asia

Substantial neuroscience output from India, Indonesia, and China remains underrepresented in open infrastructure, and the region has no dedicated open-neuroscience archive comparable to Africa’s emerging cluster.

---

Coverage of the Global South is uneven and still developing. Contributions and corrections from researchers in these regions are welcome.