Neuroscientists challenge NIH’s proposed data-access policy | The Transmitter: Neuroscience News and Perspectives

"The neuroimaging community is pushing back against a new U.S. policy proposal that would require federally funded researchers to share data only through controlled-access repositories....

The draft policy also does not line up with the current privacy risks of properly de-identified brain scans, says Anita Jwa, a research scholar in Russell Poldrack’s lab at Stanford University. Jwa is part of OpenNeuro, an open platform for sharing neuroimaging data, and is drafting a response on behalf of that group. “It’s a little bit disproportionate to impose this kind of controlled access to all human neuroimaging data,” she says.

The policy would “be burdensome not just for researchers but also for institutions and data repositories to impose those requirements,” she adds. Currently, most open repositories do not require preapproval and instead grant access once a requester agrees to the repository’s terms of use.

And most repository infrastructure is not equipped to comply with the security standards..."