Welcome to the UBC Dynamic Brain Circuits Cluster White Paper!!

Overview

The Dynamic Brain Circuits and Connections in Health and Disease research cluster is composed of researchers across departments and faculties united by their collective pursuit of advancing the study of brain connections and their dynamic changes during development, lSearning, and disease. This white paper aims to provide information, recommendations, and best practices in data management to aid labs in the Brain Circuits cluster, and the greater DMCBH community, to develop and maintain Data Management Plans (DMPs). This includes considerations to data storage, data sharing, research data workflows, and data stewardship throughout the research life cycle.

We are addressing a global shift towards Open Science and the pressing need within the cluster for secure data storage throughout the research process, from collection to long-term preservation. There is an understandable reluctance to invest time, money, and effort into data sharing and there are also potential risks involved, including misuse and misinterpretation of data, and inappropriate or absence of proper assignment of scientific credit [1]. We therefore encourage cluster labs to recognize that the potential and demonstrated benefits of being scientifically open can greatly outweigh its drawbacks. Data sharing and transparency increases reliability and reproducibility of research findings and promotes collaboration. Many journals, repositories, and funding agencies now require or encourage open data, and several grant agencies now require researchers to outline their data management and sharing plans [2]. Sharing data can also boost citation count [3], [4] and a proven record of open science can positively impact careers of both new and established neuroscientists.

We present a number of possible solutions to data management, the selection of which was guided by UBC standards and legal and ethics policies. Since some of the services outlined in the paper are in development, we created this website to update the information presented in the document. This website contains example use cases, demonstrations, and documentation to aid in training and to speed up adoption. The primary purpose of the white paper and is to reduce the barriers that deter or hinder the implementation of DMPs and data sharing within the cluster.

In pursuit of this goal, we have also provisioned resources for the use of the cluster, including:

Indices and tables

[1]Gardner D, Toga AW, Ascoli GA, et al. Towards effective and rewarding data sharing. Neuroinformatics. 2003;1(3):289-295. doi:10.1385/NI:1:3:289
[2]Spires-Jones TL, Poirazi P, Grubb MS. Opening up: Open access publishing, data sharing, and how they can influence your neuroscience career. Eur J Neurosci. 2016;43(11):1413-1419. doi:10.1111/ejn.13234
[3]Piwowar HA, Day RS, Fridsma DB. Sharing Detailed Research Data Is Associated with Increased Citation Rate. Ioannidis J, ed. PLoS One. 2007;2(3):e308. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000308
[4]Piwowar HA, Vision TJ. Data reuse and the open data citation advantage. PeerJ. 2013;1:e175. doi:10.7717/peerj.175