Recommendations for repositories and scientific gateways from a neuroscience perspective

Digital services such as repositories and science gateways have become key resources for the neuroscience community, but users often have a hard time orienting themselves in the service landscape to find the best fit for their particular needs.

INCF's Infrastructure Committee has created an inclusive set of criteria that can apply to a wide and diverse range of digital services, including repositories, science gateways, data, and software. These criteria are part of INCF’s mission to support the transmission to FAIR neuroscience, and  are intended to be a ‘living’ set, regularly updated to reflect developments in neuroscience research infrastructure needs.

The recommendations published as a Comment in Scientific Data, are intended to document the reasoning and considerations that went into the criteria development process, so that the same guiding principles can be used for further development.

Recommendations

• Ensure discoverability and transparency in ownership and service usage statistics
• Clearly communicate access and reuse conditions
• Consider ethical requirements for authorship transparency and sensitive data
• Follow best practices for licensing and responsibility
• Ensure accessibility and interoperability
• Build capabilities for reproducibility, replicability, reuse
• Excel in documentation and user support
• Be transparent in governance and operations
• Involve community in governance and decision making
• Be transparent on sustainability - financial and technical

Publication

Recommendations for repositories and scientific gateways from a neuroscience perspective
Sandström M, Abrams M, Bjaalie JG, Hicks M, Kennedy DN, Kumar A, Poline J_B, Roy PK, Tiesinga P, Wachtler T, Goscinski WJ
Scientific Data 9, 212 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-022-01334-1