Purpose

Human intracranial electrophysiological data are among the most rare and difficult-to-collect data in neuroscience. InBRAIN participation is based on a commitment to share the raw data, pre-processing methods, analysis code, and results, to ensure that the unique opportunity to conduct invasive human neuroscience is optimized and ethical.

Data Sharing Principles

InBRAIN member labs agree to provide access to intra-cranial electrophysiological data from their experiments to other members of the collaboration. All data acquired at MGH is routed through the InBRAIN data scientist, including metadata, for storage in an SQL database. Data and code for any given project are expected to be made publicly available upon reasonable request, at the time of project publication.

Data Warehousing

Data collected in the central database is organized in a systematic fashion that allows for scripts to run through the dataset. While standardization to a recognized data storage format is recommended, the data scientist will work with participants to ensure that their datasets can be queried through automated scripts. All necessary metadata about the dataset is stored in SQL databases that can be queried by users exploring the data. Participants agree to work with the data scientist to extract relevant metadata to be added to the database if not already available in table form. Data is duplicated for stable long-term storage at the raw, pre-processed, and results stages.

Data Access 

A member lab’s data is available to other member labs upon formal request to the data scientist and the lab’s Principal Investigator (PI). Requests include the research question being asked and expectations for authorship in any resulting publication are defined, and each request and subsequent access to data is logged by the data scientist.