Neuroscience has undergone a significant transformation over the past decade, becoming an increasingly open and FAIR discipline. I provide personal perspectives on the importance of two community organizations, FORCE11: The Future of Research Communications and e-Scholarship and INCF: The International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility in providing the intellectual and community environment where ideas and open sharing of data and code were incubated and tried.

Maryann. E. Martone

In this perspective article, we consider the critical issue of data and other research object standardisation and, specifically, how international collaboration, and organizations such as the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF) can encourage that emerging neuroscience data be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR). As neuroscientists engaged in the sharing and integration of multi-modal and multiscale data, we see the current insufficiency of standards as a major impediment in the Interoperability and Reusability of research results. We call for increased international collaborative standardisation of neuroscience data to foster integration and efficient reuse of research objects.

Jean-Baptiste Poline, David N. Kennedy, Friedrich T. Sommer, Giorgio A. Ascoli, David C. Van Essen, Adam R. Ferguson, Jeffrey S. Grethe, Michael J. Hawrylycz, Paul M. Thompson, Russell A. Poldrack, Satrajit S. Ghosh, David B. Keator, Thomas L. Athey, Joshua T. Vogelstein, Helen S. Mayberg, and Maryann E. Martone

Digital services such as repositories and science gateways have become key resources for the neuroscience community, but users often have a hard time orienting themselves in the service landscape to find the best fit for their particular needs. INCF has developed a set of recommendations and associated criteria for choosing or setting up and running a repository or scientific gateway, intended for the neuroscience community, with a FAIR neuroscience perspective.

Malin Sandström, Mathew Abrams, Jan G. Bjaalie, Mona Hicks, David N. Kennedy, Arvind Kumar, Jean-Baptiste Poline, Prasun K. Roy, Paul Tiesinga, Thomas Wachtler & Wojtek J. Goscinski 

William Grisham, Mathew Abrams, Walt E Babiec, Adrienne L Fairhall, Robert E Kass, Pascal Wallisch, Richard Olivo

Lorenz S Neuwirth, Princy S Quadros-Mennella, Yuan Yuan Kang, Monica L Linden, Marc Nahmani, Mathew Abrams, Melanie P Leussis, Kurt R Illig

There is great need for coordination around standards and best practices in neuroscience to support efforts to make neuroscience a data-centric discipline. Major brain initiatives launched around the world are poised to generate huge stores of neuroscience data. At the same time, neuroscience, like many domains in biomedicine, is confronting the issues of transparency, rigor, and reproducibility. Widely used, validated standards and best practices are key to addressing the challenges in both big and small data science, as they are essential for integrating diverse data and for developing a robust, effective, and sustainable infrastructure to support open and reproducible neuroscience. However, developing community standards and gaining their adoption is difficult. The current landscape is characterized both by a lack of robust, validated standards and a plethora of overlapping, underdeveloped, untested and underutilized standards and best practices. The International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF), an independent organization dedicated to promoting data sharing through the coordination of infrastructure and standards, has recently implemented a formal procedure for evaluating and endorsing community standards and best practices in support of the FAIR principles. By formally serving as a standards organization dedicated to open and FAIR neuroscience, INCF helps evaluate, promulgate, and coordinate standards and best practices across neuroscience. Here, we provide an overview of the process and discuss how neuroscience can benefit from having a dedicated standards body.

Mathew Birdsall Abrams, Jan G. Bjaalie, Samir Das, Gary F. Egan, Satrajit S. Ghosh, Wojtek J. Goscinski, Jeffrey S. Grethe, Jeanette Hellgren Kotaleski, Eric Tatt Wei Ho, David N. Kennedy, Linda J. Lanyon, Trygve B. Leergaard, Helen S. Mayberg, Luciano Milanesi, Roman Mouček, J. B. Poline, Prasun K. Roy. Stephen C. Strother, Tong Boon Tang, Paul Tiesinga, Thomas Wachtler, Daniel K. Wójcik, Maryann E. Martone

Preparing a workforce to meet the challenges of large-scale neuroscience data and producing curricula and resources for large-scale neuroscience data analysis

Place: Arlington, VA

Aim:  To assess the current state of the human brain mapping field and atlas generation to determine the requirements and challenges to the development of a multi-modal human brain atlas.

Place: Seattle, Washington

Aim: Evaluate the consilience between murine models and human disease, with an emphasis on neurological and psychiatric diseases that have high prevalence and burden.

Place:Utrecht, The Netherlands

To assess the current state of the field and available software infrastructure for tissue modeling from within the field of neuroscience and other fields in order to broadly define an outline of the development needed. 

Place: Stockholm, Sweden

Aim: The presentations and discussions of the workshop focused on three major issues related to workflows in electrophysiology: (i) the development of data structures and software libraries that enable interfacing of data from various sources and integration of methods for data manipulation and analysis, (ii) documentation and provenance tracking solutions to support reproducible analysis processes able to cope with the required levels of flexibility and data size, and (iii) workflow management systems that allow automatic and extensible processing of complex analysis workflows, in particular on high performance computers.

Place: Jülich, Germany

Objective: The aim of this workshop was to discuss the strategies for forming the Lithuanian Neuroinformatics Node and becoming a member of INCF. The workshop was organized by Dr. Aušra Saudargiene (Department of Informatics, Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, and Faculty of Natural Sciences, Vilnius University, Lithuania) and INCF.

Place: Kaunas, Lithuania

Objective: build the Canada neuroinformatics community, enabling Canadian scientists from diverse neuroinformatics-related fields to gather, exchange knowledge and discuss whether there was community desire for Canada to join the INCF.

Place: Vancuver, Canada

Objective: Using tested and proven methods and algorithms for data analysis is an essential prerequisite for reproducible research. For many types of data analysis in neuroscience, however, there are no established measures or test data for quality assessment and comparison of methods. In this two-day workshop, we investigated the needs for concerted efforts to address validation of other analysis methods for different types of data. 

Place: Stockholm, Sweden

Aim: Share techniques and experiences from research groups working on whole brain data integration and modeling in different species. This includes issues including metadata annotation, standard vocabularies and ontologies, reference coordinate spaces and methods for performing analysis and data integration of large multiscale datasets. The outcome will help set the agenda for key developments in required standards and technologies to facilitate the integration of data in the fly, rodent and human brains.

Place: Stockholm, Sweden

Aim: This encyclopedia should provide a semantically organized forum that is built on the latest appropriate technologies and resources for the neuroscience community to develop and maintain ontologies with clear definitions and links to relevant literature, data, models and other resources.

Place: San Diego, United States

Aim: Asses and review the current state of rodent atlasing and atlasing tools, and to within this context identify possible barriers to community adoption of the INCF-developed Waxholm Space and its underlying Digital Atlasing Infrastructure.

Place: Stockholm, Sweden

Objective: INCF recently started efforts to establish a cyberinfrastructure for neuroinformatics, including federated filesystems and object models for sharing neuroscientific data, and standards for workflows. The goal of this workshop is to discuss the development of an international federated dataspace for large-scale heterogeneous data.

Place: Stockholm, Sweden

Theme: What are the issues arising when providing extended and short courses in neuroinformatics? How could the INCF facilitate training? In Workshop 2, delegates concentrated on developing the list of subject areas where neuroinformatics training is needed. In Workshop 3, there was discussion on both the stumbling blocks encountered when designing and running short courses and what new short courses are required. Ways in which INCF can be involved were identified, and specific recommendations on the coordination of existing material, validation of courses and funding of short training workshops were colllected and listed in this report.

Place: Pilsen, Czech Republic

Objective: Discuss the use and benefits of applying neuroinformatics at each step of building, evaluating and using genetic animal models for human brain diseases. Participants include both neuroinformaticians and experimentalists, with representatives from the mouse/rodent, fly, zebrafish and non-human primate research communities.

Place: Stockholm, Sweden

Objective: Provide an overview of the current state of neuroinformatics training and to make recommendations for future training provisions. 

Place: Edinburgh, UK

Objective: To survey current activities and plans related to mouse and rat brain digital atlasing systems and to produce a broad international inventory of resources and ongoing efforts. To review the range of techniques that are being used to build, normalize, segment, and label atlases and to examine what aspects of this technical work are redundant, compatible, and compliant across platforms. To forge an international network to foster increased collaboration and interoperability across national, linguistic, and funding barriers and to examine how to promote international collaborations in the future and to improve the impact of atlasing projects in the near term (5 years) while reducing costs and redundancy of these efforts.

Place: Stockholm, Sweden

Objective: Map existing neuroimaging databases, particularly databases containing primary data, and to identify mechanisms that could facilitate integrated use of such databases, including possible fusion of databases.

Place: Stockholm, Sweden

Objective: Map out existing portal services for neuroscience, identify their features and future plans, and outline opportunities for synergistic developments. 

Place: Stockholm, Sweden

Objective: Agree on a general strategy for developing a systematic, useful, and scientifically appropriate framework for neuroanatomical nomenclature. 

Place: Stockholm, Sweden

Objective: Discuss issues related to sustainability of neuroscience databases, to identify problems, to discuss solutions or approaches to these problems, and to formulate recommendations to the INCF. 

Place: Stockholm, Sweden

Objective: Survey current demands and ongoing activities and plans relating to development of tools for scalable neural network simulations. 

Place: Stocholm, Sweden