Public nEUro: a european platform to share neuroimaging datasets publicly

2216 

Abstract Submission 

Cyril Pernet¹, Melanie Ganz², Gitte Knudsen¹

¹Neurobiology Research Unit, Copenhagen, Denmark, ²University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

Cyril Pernet, PhD  
Neurobiology Research Unit
Copenhagen, Denmark

Melanie Ganz, PhD  
University of Copenhagen
Copenhagen, Denmark

Gitte Knudsen, MD, DMSc  
Neurobiology Research Unit
Copenhagen, Denmark

Data sharing using a web-platform is becoming an integral part of the research life cycle. Not only data sharing allows reproducing analyses, a tenet of experimental research, but it also allows deepening analysis of existing datasets, combining data, meta-analysing and asking outright new question. Because neuroimaging data can be seen as personal data, this activity is challenging for EU-based researchers who have to comply with the General Data Protection regulation - the law that protects EU citizens from misusing their personal data. Here we introduce Public nEUro (https://public-neuro.github.io/index.html), a platform for EU-regulation-compliant data sharing.

(1) We constructed a legal framework allowing data providers to share their neuroimaging data using institition-specific data user agreements (figure 1)
(2) We created a governance framework ensuring fair, legal and secure data sharing
(3) Leveraging Denmark's national life science super-computing facility (computerome) we can offer secured hosting of datasets
(4) Using DataLad (Halchenko et al., 2021) data catalogue (https://docs.datalad.org/projects/catalog/en/latest/) we are developing tools to share openly metadata, making EU dataset findable.
(5) Using verified user registration, we can make EU neuroimaging data accessible.

(1) We have successfully established connections with several institutions whose legal teams agreed with the 'terms and conditions' - illustrating the generalizability of our concept to share EU data.
(2) Datasets are being uploaded and processed for data sharing. Each dataset must be BIDS (Gorgolewski et al., 2016) compliant (https://bids.neuroimaging.io/) ensuring interoperability and reusability.

The sharing of EU protected neuroimaging data is possible, without the need of data lakes thereby bringing users to the data. Instead, by allowing data creator to use institution specific data user agreements, verifying users identities and controlling data access, one can bring data to users, a model we believe to be more relevant in many cases, as proven by the success of OpenNeuro. Public nEUro aims to achieve more than just providing data access, but to also make data public, that is create a public record of metadata to enhance findablity.

Databasing and Data Sharing ¹

Informatics Other ²

Informatics

Open Data

Other - GDPR