Standards and Best Practices (SBPs)
The mission of the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF), is to serve as a standard organization promoting neuroscience community developed standards and best practices that are open and FAIR. INCF encourages the development of the community standards through special interest groups (SIGs) and working groups, supported by online as well as in-person courses and workshops.
We are further developing our aim to promote the neuroinformatics field and advance data reuse and reproducibility in brain research by implementing a process for endorsement of community standards and best practices (SBPs) for neuroscience.
The endorsement process includes a community review and is overseen by a committee appointed by the Council for Training, Science, and Infrastructure (CTSI). Endorsed SBPs will be made available on incf.org and promoted to the community, to journals, and to funders through INCF’s training and outreach efforts.
INCF definition of a standard
A standard needs to have a clear specification that enables implementations according to and interoperable with the standard. In addition, a standard should have a reference implementation, however, importantly, the implementation is not the standard. Rather, the standard should be defined independently of an implementation. For that reason, software frameworks as such are not considered suitable for endorsement by INCF.
