With a grant from Templeton World Charity Foundation, a collaborative team—Daniel Marcus, Lucia Melloni, and Sean Hill—is developing a cost-free laboratory notebook that allows neuroscientists to share experimental data.

They will also build a comprehensive open science platform that captures a broader range of experimental data, produces a semantic representation of the data, and provides users with tools to search for and access the semantically enabled data.

The platform will build on several key components. The e-notebook includes a user-friendly, app-based interface to define the structure and content of experiments, including fMRI, EEG, MEG, and ECOG methods. The database will use the XNAT informatics system developed by Dr. Marcus's laboratory and Radiologics. The data discovery component will build on the Blue Brain Nexus platform developed by Dr. Hill's team.

XNAT and Nexus are popular open source applications that have advanced reproducible science. In this project, the team will integrate these applications through a set of open APIs and data structures. They will also create a new user-focused web-based data discovery service. This service will enable scientists to aggregate, compare, and reanalyze data in a scientifically rigorous manner. The platform will provide a sweeping new set of functions that promote and enable reproducible neuroscience, shaping the next generation of scientific publishing.​