Our portal is newly stocked with a multitude of resources to researchers who are in need of guidance and knowledge around the fundamentals of data sharing and data management.

A recent paper in Scientific Data describes ASL-BIDS, the extension of BIDS (Brain Imaging Data Structure) for arterial spin labeling.  BIDS is a versatile standard for diverse types of neuroimaging data, originating from the INCF Taskforce for Neuroimaging Data Sharing and endorsed by INCF as a standard in 2018.

The Neurodata Without Borders (NWB) team recently published a paper in eLife, “The Neurodata Without Borders ecosystem for neurophysiological data science” that describes their 8 year long effort to develop a data standard and a surrounding software ecosystem for neurophysiology data.

One of INCF’s core activities is the endorsement and promotion of already existing community Standards and Best Practices (SBPs). We have working groups developing newSBPs, and/or developing tools that implement SBPs to make them useful for the rest of the community. You can read more about why and how we endorse Standards and Best Practices, and browse our Standards and Best Practices portfolio.

Having read about the FAIR principles in our last post, you might wonder - what is metadata? Metadata is data that describes other data. It summarizes basic information about data, making it easier to find and work with particular instances of data. To be as useful as possible, metadata needs to be standardized so it can be used and understood by many, and especially by machines.

Rapid technical development means that neuroscience datasets are growing ever bigger and more complex, which makes them harder to store, analyze and share. However, if data are organized, well defined and well described in a standardized way, computational methods can help.

The INCF/OCNS Software Working Group is hosting a virtual five-day satellite event with neuroscience software tool tutorials on June 27 - July 1, before the CNS*2022 conference.

The INCF Secretariat and community are deeply saddened to hear of the passing of Gordon Shepherd: a great supporter of the INCF mission and a much appreciated friend and colleague. Gordon will be sorely missed and his enthusiasm and kindness will live on - he was a truly neuroinformagical person.

The INCF Infrastructure Committee’s “Recommendations for repositories and science gateways from a neuroscience perspective” has been published today, May 16, as a Comment in Scientific Data. The INCF Infrastructure Committee (IC), then led by Wojtek Goscinski, started the project with dual purposes - to help neuroscience researchers choose good services for their specific use cases, and to help service providers make good and future-proof decisions for setup and operations.

The Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform (CONP) was established in 2017, as a national network of Canadian neuroscience research centers committed to collaborating on a series of new open neuroscience initiatives, centered on sharing data and tools. CONP is a collaborator of INCF and has funding from Brain Canada and many other partner organizations.