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INCF Infrastructure Committee recommendations published in Scientific Data

16 May 2022

The INCF Infrastructure Committee’s “Recommendations for repositories and science gateways from a neuroscience perspective” has been published today, May 16, as a Comment in Scientific Data.

The INCF Infrastructure Committee (IC), then led by Wojtek Goscinski, started the project with dual purposes - to help neuroscience researchers choose good services for their specific use cases, and to help service providers make good and future-proof decisions for setup and operations. Since most neuroscience research involves research software and needs a lot of computational power, they aimed to develop an inclusive set of criteria that could span the range of neuroscience needs and apply to a wide and diverse range of digital services, including repositories and science gateways, for both data and software. 

The work began in October 2020. A draft version was presented to the community at the INCF Assembly in April 2021, in a workshop with representatives from organizations engaged in similar projects, including FAIRSharing, FORCE11, and the Coalition of Open Access Repositories (COAR). A public first version of the criteria checklist was made available on the INCF portal in late 2021.

The criteria are intended to be a ‘living’ set, regularly updated to reflect developments in neuroscience research infrastructure needs and possibilities.The recommendations published in the Comment 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
  1. Ensure discoverability and transparency in ownership and service usage statistics
  2. Clearly communicate access and reuse conditions
  3. Consider ethical requirements for authorship transparency and sensitive data
  4. Follow best practices for licensing and responsibility
  5. Ensure accessibility and interoperability
  6. Build capabilities for reproducibility, replicability, reuse
  7. Excel in documentation and user support
  8. Be transparent in governance and operations
  9. Involve community in governance and decision making
  10. Be transparent on sustainability - financial and technical
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