Introducing the OHBM Open Science Demo Calls

By Elizabeth DuPre and Kirstie Whitaker

The open neuroimaging community is great and growing every day. This month saw the first of a series of Open Science Demo Calls. Brought to you by the OHBM Open Science Special Interest Group, these live streamed calls are a chance to hear from the developers of open neuroimaging tools. We'll use these calls to build connections between all members of the OHBM Open Science community and to tell the stories of the people making outstanding and reproducible neuroscience happen.

Alejandro de la Vega

For our first call, we spoke to Alejandro de la Vega, Cameron Craddock, and Guiomar Niso about three ongoing initiatives they’re spearheading to improve openness in neuroimaging research.

Alejandro spoke about NeuroScout, a new, cloud-based platform allowing for the flexible re-analysis of neuroimaging datasets with naturalistic stimuli, such as the Study Forrest dataset. To do this, Alejandro is actively working to develop tools such as pliers and pybids. If you’re interested in this line of research, make sure to check out and contribute to these tools!

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Cameron Craddock

Cameron discussed this year’s Brainhack Global. Building off the successes of Brainhack Global 2017, Cameron is organizing a globally based hackathon for this spring, where neuroimaging researchers around the world can come together online to learn about, develop, and improve open neuroimaging tools. He encourages anyone interested in attending the event to join the Brainhack Slack team.

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Guiomar Niso

Technical difficulties prevented us from seeing Guiomar in our call, so we recorded a supplementary video to hear more about her work with MEG-BIDS. This is a very big extension of the BIDS specification to cover MEG data. As Guiomar informed us, MEG does not have a standardized acquisition file format (like MRI dicoms), so the creation of an MEG-BIDS standard will make a huge difference to the community! Feedback is welcomed on the current draft of the specification, which is planned for release on February 14th.  

Our next call will be on Thursday February 22nd at 7pm GMT (check your local time zone) and will feature Anisha Keshavan on Braindr, Yaroslav Halchenko on DataLad and Athina Tzovara discussing how research treats underrepresented minorities.

If you’d like to nominate yourself or someone else to be featured on these monthly calls, please add their information at this github issue, or email the host of the calls Kirstie Whitaker at kw401@cam.ac.uk. You can join the OSSIG google group to receive reminders each month.

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