The INCF community blog is where we collect news, success stories, information about the INCF Assembly, our workshops, and community activities. You can also submit your relevant job openings. You can suggest content for the blog by filling out this form.
This summer, INCF industry member Mathworks will sponsor INCF-supported summer projects for trainees to work on neuroscience-related Community toolboxes. During a trial run last year, four trainees worked with mentors from the toolboxes Automatic Analysis, EEGLAB, FieldTrip and MatNWB.
INCF’s 12th year as a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) mentoring organization will be the biggest yet; 40 of our projects were accepted!
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.
A new "Perspective" in Frontiers describes BIDS-Microscopy, an extension of the INCF-endorsed standard BIDS for microscopy data. The extension is included in the latest release of BIDS (1.7.0) as BEP031. BIDS is a standard prescribing a formal way to name and organize MRI data and metadata. The early development of BIDS was originated and supported by INCF as a part of its Neuroimaging Datasharing Task Force activities, and it was the first standard to be formally endorsed by INCF
NeuroHackademy is a two-week long summer school in neuroimaging and data science, organized by long-term INCF community member Ariel Rokem and Noah Benson, held at the University of Washington eScience Institute.We have interviewed Ariel Rokem to learn more about the course, how it came to be, and what makes the hackathon culture a great space for collaboration and learning.
Our yearly community meeting, the INCF Assembly, is a unique venue where neuroscience researchers, tool developers, standards developers and infrastructure providers can meet with potential collaborators and hear about the latest advancements in neuroinformatics and FAIR neuroscience.
This year, the Assembly will be hosted on the Gather platform.
Terminology is often a barrier to enter a new field. The open scholarship movement in particular has generated many new terms and acronyms. Now there is a community-sourced glossary for open scholarship terms, developed with the aim to facilitate education and improve communication between experts and newcomers. The first version, v1.0, lists 250 terms and was recently described in a Comment in Nature Human Behaviour.
On January 25, the INCF Standards and Best Practices committee endorsed the MBF neuromorphological file format v 4.0, as a standard. It is commonly known as “Neurolucida XML” and is used for digital reconstruction & modeling structure for microscopic anatomies.
The goal of the MatNWB Working Group is to support the re-use of neurophysiology data via NWB by collecting MATLAB user requirements, outreaching to the wider MATLAB user community, coordinating among development teams (MatNWB, core NWB, MathWorks), identifying community project and collaboration opportunities, and other activities as may be determined.
-
Developing standards requires both community coordination and consensus. Standards must also have governance structures to ensure sustainability, in addition to continued development to stay relevant and useful. Successful standards development and adoption requires collaborative channels for the community to identify common problems and find potential solutions - the INCF Assembly is intended to build productive communities around neuroscience standards.