Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform (CONP)

From Brain Canada:

The Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform (CONP) is a national platform for open sharing of neuroscience research data and brings together many of the country’s leading scientists in basic and clinical neuroscience to form an interactive network of collaborations in brain research, interdisciplinary partnership, clinical translation and Open Publishing. The goal of the platform is to improve the accessibility and re-usability of neuroscience data and, by increasing awareness of ongoing and past research efforts, it will reduce unnecessary duplication and overlap, resulting in a more efficient use of funding support. The CONP will also engage young investigators across the country in order to develop the next generation of “open” scientists.

The platform is currently under development, and is slated to be available to researchers in 2021. Researchers are encouraged to become early adopters and work with CONP during this beta phase. Their website is available here, where they publish updates and other information.

The platform provides the following technologies:

CONP Portal

The portal aggregates metadata from different sources to serve as a central repository for Canadian neuroscience, giving researchers the ability to discover and access past and ongoing research data to reduce unnecessary duplication and overlap and foster collaboration. While they do not host the data, they point to different data sources, allowing researchers the flexibility of choosing how and where their data is kept. They are also developing a method of tiered access to datasets for controlled sharing of data.

NeuroLibre

NeuroLibre is a curated repository of interactive publications. It uses Binder to allow researchers to publish Jupyter Books with interactive inline code, media and widgets. The dedicated Binder server is hosted on Compute Canada servers and enables users to execute, modify and manipulate code interactively.

This allows:

  • researchers to produce a clear and reproducible publication
  • reviewers to gain further insight and develop a better understanding of the data
  • other researchers to contribute to a research project as they can run their own experiments and analysis on the data in situ
  • researchers to communicate complex ideas and research to stakeholders without a neuroscience background, such as the media.

NeuroLibre is seen as the next step in open Neuroscience publication. CONP has not placed any restrictions on what can be published through NeuroLibre, and have encouraged researchers to submit Jupyter Notebooks/Books developed at any stage of the research life cycle.