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. 2023 Jul 27;19(7):e1011230.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011230. eCollection 2023 Jul.

The Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform-An open science framework for the neuroscience community

Affiliations

The Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform-An open science framework for the neuroscience community

Rachel J Harding et al. PLoS Comput Biol. .

Abstract

The Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform (CONP) takes a multifaceted approach to enabling open neuroscience, aiming to make research, data, and tools accessible to everyone, with the ultimate objective of accelerating discovery. Its core infrastructure is the CONP Portal, a repository with a decentralized design, where datasets and analysis tools across disparate platforms can be browsed, searched, accessed, and shared in accordance with FAIR principles. Another key piece of CONP infrastructure is NeuroLibre, a preprint server capable of creating and hosting executable and fully reproducible scientific publications that embed text, figures, and code. As part of its holistic approach, the CONP has also constructed frameworks and guidance for ethics and data governance, provided support and developed resources to help train the next generation of neuroscientists, and has fostered and grown an engaged community through outreach and communications. In this manuscript, we provide a high-level overview of this multipronged platform and its vision of lowering the barriers to the practice of open neuroscience and yielding the associated benefits for both individual researchers and the wider community.

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Conflict of interest statement

I have read the journal’s policy and the authors of this manuscript have the following competing interests: Dr. SS is a senior scientific advisor and shareholder of ADMdx, Inc., which receives NIH funding, and a member of the board of InDoc, the developer and manager of Brain Code for OBI. The other authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. Workflow for submitting and publishing a NeuroLibre preprint.
(a) The source files of a NeuroLibre preprint, including a markdown file in a public code repository (such as GitHub or GitLab) containing a high-level summary, a list of authors and affiliations, and a set of configuration files for declaring data and runtime dependencies for the executable content of the preprint. (b) Upon submission to NeuroLibre, a technical review is completed on GitHub using an editorial bot (RoboNeuro) to ensure the functionality of the preprint. (c) All the outputs associated with an accepted submission (Jupyter Book, generated PDF summary, Docker image and data) are assigned a DOI and transferred to the NeuroLibre production server for hosting.

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