The data review process provides an essential service to our community by supporting researchers with the curation, sharing, access, and long-term preservation of their data

“Every data and software submission is thoroughly reviewed to check the validity of the [meta]data and to ensure quality requirements of the repository are met.”

Proper data curation enables datasets to be more easily found, understood and reused to benefit wider society. Our repository provides an intuitive infrastructure that allows researchers to discover, download and reuse data to avoid duplication of time and effort spent unnecessarily creating new datasets.

Data Organisation

File format, documentation (data descriptor (is partly also the metadata)), privacy aspects. Do the data files contain personally identifiable, sensitive or inappropriate information? Depending on the type of data, we need to add extra layers of security. Content: do the data match the metadata that is provided and does it match the scope of EBRAINS.

Metadata organisation

Data providers are asked to provide metadata regarding the dataset as well as the individual subjects that were used for the study. Information about title, description, experimental approaches, keywords, type of dataset, funding, related publications, licence, techniques, subjects, and protocols. Type of file format is reported so that it can be linked to software. This allows third parties to more easily access the data. In addition to security for identifiable data, we also allow researchers to put their data under temporary embargo until their research is published. This makes the metadata visible, so that the dataset can be cited, but the data is hidden until the manuscript is published providing extra security to the researchers.

Communication with the data provider

As soon as the data providers submits a request for curation, the preliminary information about the dataset is sent to the review board. They assess whether the dataset falls within the scope of EBRAINS. Then the dataset is assigned to one of the curators who will contact the data provider for a statement on the ethics status of the research study and for filling out additional metadata. The metadata is integrated into the knowledge graph, relying on controlled terms and ontologies, and following the metadata structure openMINDS. The standardised vocabularies and metadata allow us to link related datasets to each other.

Typically, the interaction with data providers is limited to a handful of email exchanges, starting with the request to provide metadata and finishing with the approval of the data and metadata integration into the knowledge graph before the dataset is released for publication.