A NeuroJSON community survey (2024-1) on imaging data sharing

[Qianqian Fang]

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Dear MCX and Iso2Mesh registered users,

I would like to thank you for downloading and using our MCX and Iso2mesh software in the past, and being a valuable member of our growing user community.

I am writing this email to cordially invite you to participate a short survey regarding scientific/imaging data sharing. It should not take more than 10 min of your time to complete the below 1-page google form


https://forms.gle/kBDCQszdS8sgTkxr7


A little bit background:

A few years ago, I was awarded a U24 grant from the US NIH/Brain Initiative for developing scalable, re-usable, searchable neuroimaging data format standards and data-sharing platforms. This new project, named NeuroJSON (https://neurojson.org), largely capitalizes upon the vast existing ecosystem of JSON/binary JSON formats, with particular emphases on

1) enhancing human-readbility of scientific datasets to ensure their long-term re-usability, and
2) adopting modern NoSQL/document-store database technologies for searching, indexing and storing growing number of imaging datasets.

Over the last few years, we have laid the foundation for creating this new service to the community, including defining various specifications (https://neurojson.org/#specs) using lightweight JSON annotations for storing complex data structures (ND-array, tree, table, graph etc) and JSON-wrappers for common modality-specific data files (JNIfTI for .nii, JSNIRF for .snirf, JMesh for mesh data etc).

Recently, we announced a new data-sharing portal - NeuroJSON.io (https://neurojson.io) - with intuitive web-based interfaces for browsing, previewing and downloading many existing neuroimaging datasets (many were formatted in the emerging BIDS standard, https://bids-standard.github.io), spanning across various imaging modalities and data types. For more detailed features regarding this website, please checkout our short video tutorial series in this page: https://neurojson.org/Doc/Start/User

As data sharing is becoming increasingly common - in some places, even a requirement by funding agencies - we strongly felt that this scalable data sharing platform we are building at NeuroJSON.org and NeuroJSON.io would offer valuable resources to both data end-users (for searching, downloading, reusing, and analyzing data), and data creators (sharing experimental data from your lab or studies). We are committed to sharing free/public scientific data in the long term, and maintaining an vibrant user community.

The above survey is our first step towards understanding your needs, current challenges in the field, and setting our priorities for the next step of our project.

We are greatly appreciated for your inputs! We are particularly interested in helping disseminating fNIRS datasets. We hope NeuroJSON.io becomes an aggregation point for reusable fNIRS research data.

Again, thank you for your support and participation! If you are interested in sharing your data on our platform, feel free to reach out to me directly, or post a request on our NeuroJSON user forum on Github: https://github.com/orgs/NeuroJSON/discussions


Qianqian Fang, PhD

Associate Professor
Dept. of Bioengineering, Northeastern University, Boston, MA

PS: feel free to forward this invitation to any other colleague who you believe would be interested.