Introducing the rodent open science research archive

Musculoskeletal diseases affect more than half of the adult population, yet the mechanisms underlying skeletal pathology remain incompletely understood. Rodent animal models have been central to advancing this knowledge, generating decades of skeletal phenotyping data through well-established quantitative methods. Despite this, no dedicated repository exists to archive and share this data, leaving the vast majority of rodent skeletal phenotyping results accessible only through individual publications and unavailable for broader integration and reuse. Here we introduce the Rodent Open Science Skeletal Archive (ROSSA; rossa.uchc.edu), an NIH-funded, open-access web-based repository designed to store and share rodent skeletal phenotyping data. We describe the architecture of ROSSA and report on three core deliverables completed in this first phase of development: a data submission system, a core facility registry, and the underlying database infrastructure. The data submission system supports a wide range of experimental paradigms, including genetically modified animal models, pharmacological interventions, and gonadectomy procedures, and accepts quantitative phenotyping data generated by dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry (DEXA), microcomputed tomography (μCT), bone histomorphometry, mechanical strength testing, and serum, plasma, and urine biomarker assays. Submitted data are preserved in original form to ensure authenticity and parsed into a relational database to support flexible search functionality and programmatic access. The core facility registry catalogs institutional resources available to the skeletal research community. Together, these components establish ROSSA as a foundational resource for the skeletal biology community and lay the groundwork for future cross-study data integration and meta-analysis.