On October 25, the INCF SBP committee voted to endorse Neo as a standard, with standard number INCFSN-22-02.
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.

Mark Alan Musen, professor of Biomedical Informatics and of Biomedical Data Science at Stanford University points out in Nature that without appropriate metadata, shared data cannot be reused and data-sharing mandates will be pointless.

INCF is asking for your help to review the Neo object model for electrophysiology data, to assess its value as a community standard. Participating is simple; read the INCF SBP committee review report on F1000 and leave your feedback in the comments!

On January 25, the INCF Standards and Best Practices committee endorsed the MBF neuromorphological file format v 4.0, as a standard. It is commonly known as “Neurolucida XML” and is used for digital reconstruction & modeling structure for microscopic anatomies.

Developing standards requires both community coordination and consensus. Standards must also have governance structures to ensure sustainability, in addition to continued development  to stay relevant and useful. Successful standards development and adoption requires collaborative channels for the community to identify common problems and find potential solutions - the INCF Assembly is intended to build productive communities around neuroscience standards.

The Five Recommendations for FAIR Software aim to encourage the greater adoption of FAIR principles by providing a set of starting recommendations that researchers can use to improve the quality, reach, and reproducibility of their software.

The INCF endorsement process for standards and best practices has been active for more than two years. This means our earliest endorsed standards are now up for re-endorsement!

This month, INCF re-endorsed the model description language NeuroML. Earlier this summer, INCF also re-endorsed the standards BIDS (Brain Imaging Data Structure) and PyNN. 

Members of the community are asked to provide feedback on the DAQCORD Guidelines - a framework for achieving high-quality data by providing a descriptive system for planning and reporting observational studies. This is a part of INCF’s Standards and Best Practices review process to ensure the best practice being reviewed provides value to the community.

The NIX Format - a model for storing annotated datasets across a variety of disciplines - has been endorsed by INCF!

Community review helps to optimize new Standards and Best Practices (SBPs) by allowing those who will use them to highlight areas of improvement before the SBPs are accepted.