Value Added by Data Sharing: Long-Term Potentiation of Neuroscience Research

Excerpt

Neuroscience research is resulting in an enormous accumulation of complex data. The explosive growth of bioinformatics demonstrated that sharing and reanalysis of digital information can lead to exciting opportunities for scientific integration and discovery. In striking contrast, broad-spanning issues (data heterogeneity, privacy regulations, etc.) have so far limited the reanalysis of brain and neural data. Nevertheless, data sharing is possible in neuroscience as well, and the ever-increasing power of affordable hardware and software has contributed to recent spiking interest in this topic. The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) has recently established a Neuroinformatics Committee and launched the Neuroscience Database Gateway, which is already widely used by the neuroscience community (Gardner and Shepherd 2004). Funding agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), have data sharing policies, several journals require data deposition at the time of publication, and a number of books, journals, and reviews have focused on this topic in the past few years (e.g., Eckersley and the OECD Working Group on Neuroinformatics 2003). …