The Need for Open-access, Structured Data in Clinical Brain Research

Abstract

: 04 Jan 2015 K E Y W O R D S: Open Access Dataset Brain Diseases Disease Models Data Sharing A B S T R A C T Neurological and psychiatric disorders are considered major public health prob-lems associated with a significant number of suffering patients and an enormous socioeconomic burden to societies. Therefore, significant research funds have been allocated towards improving outcomes of patients suffering from brain disorders. In recent years, researchers have been facing a constantly growing worldwide pressure to make their datasets freely and readily available to other researchers and the public. The major goal of this movement is to allow re-use of already collected data in order to facilitate medical progress. There are numer-ous ways that clinical neuroscience researchers and research organizations commonly employ to make their databases available. Institutional databases and publicly available research and clinical data repositories and registries are the most common ways to share data among researchers and organizations in order to facilitate collaboration. In addition, numerous traditional neuroscience peer reviewed journals have implemented various data sharing policies. Furthermore, a few traditional clinical neuroscience peer review journals have recently started accepting dataset papers. Finally, there is a constantly growing number of data-base journals which accept clinical neuroscience research datasets for publica-tion. Potential for improving of citation metrics is among the important ad-vantages for authors considering publishing their databases in dataset journals.