LogoLogo

Open Neuroscience Graph

Open neuroscience is a global effort built on a dense network of standards, repositories, tools, institutes, consortia, working groups, and policies. This graph maps that landscape in over 300 nodes, each explained in plain language and connected by controlled relationships: a repository accepts a file format, a specification is governedBy a working group, a standard is endorsedBy a coordinating body. The aim is that researchers, data stewards, developers, and policymakers can see how the pieces fit together, and how to make neuroscience research more open.

Actors Standards Resources Governance

Overview

A set of widgets helps you explore the graph:

  • Searchbar does a full-text search across all nodes, and is the quickest way to jump straight to an entry by name or keyword if you know what you are looking for.
  • Explorer on the left is the full directory of nodes. Clicking a section header opens that directory’s overview page.
  • Graph on this home page is the global graph with every node and its connections at once. Click a node to open it, drag to explore, scroll to zoom, or use the expand button for a full-screen view.
  • Side-graph on each node page is a local network view, showing direct neighbours. Click a neighbour to navigate to it, or use the expand button for a larger view.
  • Tags lists the node’s type and domain tags, each clickable to see every other node that shares it.
  • Table of Contents provides quick in-page navigation.
  • Backlinks shows which other nodes link to the current one.

Where to start

The Perspectives are overview pages spanning practical guides, geographic regions, data modalities, and research themes. A few examples:

  • Sharing your data covers the steps to deposit a dataset, from consent and formatting to repository selection and registration. Useful for a researcher with data to share.
  • France and Europe describe open science policy, research infrastructure, and health data governance at the national and regional level. Useful for a data steward or research support officer working across those scales.
  • Neuroimaging and Health each cover one data type: their standards, repositories, and main open datasets, with links to each node. Useful for getting oriented within a modality.
  • Reproducibility and Open access publishing cover cross-cutting themes, from pre-registration, protocol sharing, and computational provenance to the routes, licensing, and policies behind open publishing. Useful for questions about open science practice rather than a specific region or data type.

For wider reference:

  • About is a presentation-ready explanation of the reason and design of this website.
  • Glossary is an A-Z index of every entry, acronym, and alias.
  • Vocabulary lists all entity types, domains, and relationship (predicate) labels.

Contributing

The field changes continuously, and so do its standards, tools and actors. Currently, the vault also has greater depth in the French and European context than elsewhere, reflecting my position at the Paris Brain Institute and the systemic concentration of (br)open science infrastructure. Contributions, corrections, and suggestions are therefore essential, especially anything that makes this graph (and the field) more inclusive. Editing conventions, inclusion criteria, frontmatter fields, and Dataview query examples are summarised in About, and detailed in CONTRIBUTING.md and DATAVIEW.md. Potential nodes that are deliberately not added are recorded with the reason why in LEDGER.md.

Accuracy

This graph is maintained by contributors, not by the institutions it describes. Information can be incomplete or fall out of date as policies and standards change. This matters most for legal, regulatory, and compliance content which should be checked against the issuing body’s own current documentation before a real decision. The last_reviewed date in each node’s frontmatter shows when it was last checked against primary sources, not a guarantee that nothing has changed since.

Citing

Creating and maintaining this resource requires real time and effort, so please acknowledge this in your work by citing: Whitmarsh, S. (2026). Open Neuroscience Graph. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20181900.