Brain-CODE: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable
May 30, 2023
A new manuscript authored by members of the Ontario Brain Institute's (OBI) informatics team and the Indoc Consortium was recently published in the Frontiers In Neuroinformatics journal, demonstrating OBI's strong leadership in data sharing.
The "FAIR in action: Brain-CODE - A neuroscience data sharing platform to accelerate brain research" paper describes how Brain-CODE, OBI's state-of-the-art neuroinformatics platform, has operationalized data sharing according to the FAIR principles - Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability. These principles have emerged in the last decade as guiding elements on how datasets should be structured, annotated, and packaged to enable maximal reuse.
OBI has operationalized data sharing according to the FAIR principles in the following manner:
· Findable — Brain-CODE offers an interactive and itemized approach for requesters to generate data cuts of interest that align with their research questions.
· Accessible — Brain-CODE offers multiple data access mechanisms. These mechanisms—that distinguish between metadata access, data access within a secure computing environment on Brain-CODE and data access via export will be discussed.
· Interoperable — Standardization happens at the data capture level and the data release stage to allow integration with similar data elements.
· Reusable - Brain-CODE ensures that detailed metadata are shared along with the core datasets to facilitate their interpretation and analyses.
The paper also highlights the successes and challenges of a FAIR-focused neuroinformatics platform that facilitates the widespread collection and sharing of neuroscience research data for learning health systems.
"The effective sharing of health research data within the healthcare ecosystem can have tremendous impact on the advancement of disease understanding, prevention, treatment, and monitoring. By combining and reusing health research data, increasingly rich insights can be made about patients and populations that feed back into the health system resulting in more effective best practices and better patient outcomes," write the authors.
"To achieve the promise of a learning health system, data needs to meet the FAIR principles of findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability. Since the inception of the Brain-CODE platform and services in 2012, the Ontario Brain Institute (OBI) has pioneered data sharing activities aligned with FAIR principles in neuroscience."
READ THE FULL PUBLICATION ON THE FRONTIERS WEBSITE.