Open Data In Neurophysiology: Advancements, Solutions & Challenges

Ongoing efforts over the last 50 years have made data and methods more reproducible and transparent across the life sciences. This openness has led to transformative insights and vastly accelerated scientific progress (Gražulis et al., 2012; Munafó et al., 2017). For example, structural biology (Bruno and Groom, 2014) and genomics (Benson et al., 2013; Porter and Hajibabaei, 2018) have undertaken systematic collection and publication of protein sequences and structures over the past half century. These data, in turn, have led to scientific breakthroughs that were unthinkable when data collection first began (Jumper et al., 2021). We believe that neuroscience is poised to follow the same path, and that principles of open data and open science will transform our understanding of the nervous system in ways that are impossible to predict at the moment. New social structures supporting an active and open scientific community are essential (Saunders, 2022) to facilitate and expand the still limited adoption of open science practices in our field (Schottdorf et al., 2024). Unified by shared values of openness, we set out to organize a symposium for open data in neurophysiology (ODIN) to strengthen our community and facilitate transformative open neuroscience research at large. In this report, we synthesize insights from this first ODIN event. We also lay out plans for how to grow this movement, document emerging conversations, and propose a path toward a better and more transparent science of tomorrow.