SfN starts tomorrow - Sat Nov 12 - and we look forward to seeing you there! Here is a list of the INCF member activities that will be taking place during the week. Note that we may add to this list as the week goes on, so feel free to check back!

Infrastructure Committee is trying to identify barriers to data sharing and reuse among neuroscience researchers worldwide, with a brief anonymous survey. The results will be made public, and will be used by INCF to develop strategies and activities for supporting the global neuroscience community.

INCF is asking for your help to review the Neo object model for electrophysiology data, to assess its value as a community standard.

Neo is an object model for handling electrophysiology data in multiple formats. It is suitable for representing data acquired from electroencephalographic, intracellular, or extracellular recordings, or generated from simulations.

The Allen Institute OpenScope Program, DANDI Archive, Neurodata Without Borders (NWB), and The Kavli Foundation are joining up to arrange a hackathon for secondary analysis of neurophysiology data on October 3 - 5, 2022 at the Allen Institute.

This summer, INCF industry member Mathworks will sponsor INCF-supported summer projects for trainees to work on neuroscience-related Community toolboxes. During a trial run last year, four trainees worked with mentors from the toolboxes Automatic Analysis, EEGLAB, FieldTrip  and MatNWB.

INCF’s 12th year as a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) mentoring organization will be the biggest yet; 40 of our projects were accepted!

Terminology is often a barrier to enter a new field. The open scholarship movement in particular has generated many new terms and acronyms. Now there is a community-sourced glossary for open scholarship terms, developed with the aim to facilitate education and improve communication between experts and newcomers. The first version, v1.0, lists 250 terms and was recently described in a Comment in Nature Human Behaviour. 

The goal of the MatNWB Working Group is to support the re-use of neurophysiology data via NWB by collecting MATLAB user requirements, outreaching to the wider MATLAB user community, coordinating among development teams (MatNWB, core NWB, MathWorks), identifying community project and collaboration opportunities, and other activities as may be determined.

This week, INCF is applying to participate in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) for the 12th time running. GSoC is a long-running program where contributors new to open source work with mentors on coding projects supported by a stipend from Google.

INCF has been an active member of the IBI for several years, and Maryann Martone, chair of the INCF Governing Board, is also the co-chair of the IBI Data Standards and Sharing Working Group. In December 2021 the working group’s task force on International Data Governance published a paper describing issues and possible solutions for brain data governance.