Federal Researchers Propose Strategy to Handle Deluge of Neuroscience Data

"For a first step, the authors recommend that researchers from all facets of neuroscience agree on standard descriptions and file formats for products derived from data analysis and simulations. After that, the researchers should work with computer scientists to develop hardware and software ecosystems for archiving and sharing data. 

The authors suggest an ecosystem similar to the one used by the physics community to share data collected by experiments like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In this case, each research group has their own local repository of physiological or simulation data that they’ve collected or generated. But eventually, all of this information should also be included in 'meta-repositories' that are accessible to the greater neuroscience community. Files in the 'meta-repositories' should be in a common format, and the repositories would ideally be hosted by an open-science supercomputing facility like the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), located at Berkeley Lab. "