The Initiative - NFDI Neuroscience

Better data - better neuroscience

Heterogeneity, complexity and growing volumes of neuroscience data, paired with the demand to re-use valuable experimental data, make it increasingly important to provide infrastructural support for the data management tasks of neuroscientists.

Emerging solutions need to be integrated and further developed to achieve a coherent and efficient data management framework for neuroscientists, addressing the specific needs of the researchers.

The NFDI Neuroscience consortium aims at building a community to develop the conceptual and practical basis for managing research data for the neurosciences. It will be integrated into the National Research Data Infrastructure.

The consortium is supported by the Neurowissenschaftliche Gesellschaft (NWG), the Bernstein Network for Computational Neuroscience, and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für klinische Neurophysiologie (DGKN).

Our mission

Building a community-centered process where scientists benefit from and contribute to improving the research data management infrastructure.

NFDI Neuroscience aims to help researchers addressing their needs with existing solutions and to trigger and coordinate the development of new solutions where necessary. Community involvement on different levels is essential for this process - from the contributions of individual researchers to the representation of large collaborative research projects and institutions. See an overview of the Task Areas for specific measures and find out how to get involved.

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Our goal

Offering a unifying framework for standardizing data handling that seamlessly connects the lab data procedures to remote data services.

The research data management (RDM) strategy considers the entire data life cycle, implementing RDM measures already when data is acquired and creating immediate benefit for the researcher. In particular, NFDI-Neuro will address the situation in the neuroscientific labs, where acquisition and primary processing of the data happens and the decisive action for reproducibility and later reusability of the data must be implemented by adhering to the FAIR principles. In addition, NFDI-Neuro will foster competences, awareness and skills of the neuroscientists required to utilize and exploit the potential of technical solutions for RDM.

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Our objectives

Setting up a work program with a unifying approach and common objectives that addresses the RDM needs in different neuroscience subdomains.

Provide a unified framework for making data, tools, and research interoperable across the neuroscience domains and beyond and implement the FAIR principles.
Define standards for data structures, workflows, and quality control in neuroscience.
Guide the development of common metadata schemas to improve the comprehensive description of datasets, in neuroscience and beyond.
Develop standards and guidelines for legal, ethical, and data privacy protection issues in accordance with national law and across NFDI consortia.
Organize and operate a community portal (“marketplace”) for finding, sharing, and accessing ready-to-use data and tools across all neurosciences.
Implement a community network to promote the exchange of knowledge and the advancement of RDM in neuroscience.
Increase collaboration of the neuroscience community with initiatives internationally and across scientific domains.
Offer comprehensive RDM training addressing all stages of the research education and research career.

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