The development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques has defined modern neuroimaging. Since its inception, tens of thousands of studies using techniques such as functional MRI and diffusion weighted imaging have allowed for the non-invasive study of the brain. Despite the fact that MRI is routinely used to obtain data for neuroscience research, there has been no widely adopted standard for organizing and describing the data collected in an imaging experiment. This renders sharing and reusing data (within or between labs) difficult if not impossible and unnecessarily complicates the application of automatic pipelines and quality assurance protocols. To solve this problem, we have developed the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS), a standard for organizing and describing MRI datasets. The BIDS standard uses file formats compatible with existing software, unifies the majority of practices already common in the field, and captures the metadata necessary for most common data processing operations.

Responding to widespread concerns about reproducibility, the Organization for Human Brain Mapping created a working group to identify best practices in data analysis, results reporting and data sharing to promote open and reproducible research in neuroimaging. We describe the challenges of open research and the barriers the field faces. Given concerns about the reproducibility of scientific findings, neuroimaging must define best practices for data analysis, results reporting, and algorithm and data sharing to promote transparency, reliability and collaboration. We describe insights from developing a set of recommendations on behalf of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping and identify barriers that impede these practices, including how the discipline must change to fully exploit the potential of the world's neuroimaging data.

Gene expression fundamentally shapes the structural and functional architecture of the human brain. Open-access transcriptomic datasets like the Allen Human Brain Atlas provide an unprecedented ability to examine these mechanisms in vivo; however, a lack of standardization across research groups has given rise to myriad processing pipelines for using these data. Here, we develop the abagen toolbox, an open-access software package for working with transcriptomic data, and use it to examine how methodological variability influences the outcomes of research using the Allen Human Brain Atlas. Applying three prototypical analyses to the outputs of 750,000 unique processing pipelines, we find that choice of pipeline has a large impact on research findings, with parameters commonly varied in the literature influencing correlations between derived gene expression and other imaging phenotypes by as much as ρ ≥ 1.0. Our results further reveal an ordering of parameter importance, with processing steps that influence gene normalization yielding the greatest impact on downstream statistical inferences and conclusions. The presented work and the development of the abagen toolbox lay the foundation for more standardized and systematic research in imaging transcriptomics, and will help to advance future understanding of the influence of gene expression in the human brain.

Significant resources around the world have been invested in neuroimaging studies of brain function and disease. Easier access to this large body of work should have profound impact on research in cognitive neuroscience and psychiatry, leading to advances in the diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric and neurological disease. A trend toward increased sharing of neuroimaging data has emerged in recent years. Nevertheless, a number of barriers continue to impede momentum. Many researchers and institutions remain uncertain about how to share data or lack the tools and expertise to participate in data sharing. The use of electronic data capture methods for neuroimaging greatly simplifies the task of data collection and has the potential to help standardize many aspects of data sharing. We review here the motivations for sharing neuroimaging data, the current data sharing landscape, and the sociological or technical barriers that still need to be addressed. The INCF Task Force on Neuroimaging Datasharing, in conjunction with several collaborative groups around the world, has started work on several tools to ease and eventually automate the practice of data sharing. It is hoped that such tools will allow researchers to easily share raw, processed, and derived neuroimaging data, with appropriate metadata and provenance records, and will improve the reproducibility of neuroimaging studies. By providing seamless integration of data sharing and analysis tools within a commodity research environment, the Task Force seeks to identify and minimize barriers to data sharing in the field of neuroimaging.

DataLad is a Python-based tool for the joint management of code, data, and their relationship, built on top of a versatile system for data logistics (git-annex) and the most popular distributed version control system (Git). It adapts principles of open-source software development and distribution to address the technical challenges of data management, data sharing, and digital provenance collection across the life cycle of digital objects. DataLad aims to make data management as easy as managing code. It streamlines procedures to consume, publish, and update data, for data of any size or type, and to link them as precisely versioned, lightweight dependencies. DataLad helps to make science more reproducible and FAIR (Wilkinson et al., 2016). It can capture complete and actionable process provenance of data transformations to enable automatic re-computation. The DataLad project (datalad.org) delivers a completely open, pioneering platform for flexible decentralized research data management (RDM) (Hanke, Pestilli, et al., 2021). It features a Python and a command-line interface, an extensible architecture, and does not depend on any centralized services but facilitates interoperability with a plurality of existing tools and services. In order to maximize its utility and target audience, DataLad is available for all major operating systems, and can be integrated into established workflows and environments with minimal friction.