Abstract
The sharing of primary data in the field of neuroscience has received considerable scrutiny from scientific societies and from science journals. Many see this as value added for science publishing that can enhance and inform secondary examination of data and results. Still others worry that data sharing is an undue burden for researchers with little long term value to science. But examples of how data sharing can be done successfully do exist. The fMRI Data Center, established at Dartmouth College in 2000 and now based at the University of California Santa Barbara, has worked to facilitate the open sharing of neuroimaging data from peer-reviewed papers to foster progress in cognitive science. The fMRI study on the representation of objects in the human occipital and temporal cortex, published in 2000 in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (JOCN), marked the first deposition in the new database. Despite initial concerns about fMRI data sharing, this data set was frequently downloaded. We describe the original results of distributed brain activation patterns elicited by faces and objects in the human visual system, and overview several secondary analyses by independent investigators. A philosopher tested Husserl’s temporal components of consciousness, whereas other brain imagers deployed new analytic tools, from Dynamic Causal Modeling, which estimates the neural interactions between cortical regions, to a novel method for constructing reproducibility maps. These re-analyses revealed new findings not reported in the original study, provided new perspectives on visual perception, generated new predictions, and resulted in new collaborations and publications in high profile journals.
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Notes
As of January 2007, the fMRI Data Center is based at the University of California Santa Barbara.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported in part by the Swiss National Science Foundation grant 3200B0-105278 and by the Swiss National Center for Competence in Research: Neural Plasticity and Repair grant to AI and by the National Institute of Mental Health grant P20 MH072580-03 to JDVH. The authors thank Ms. Amanda Hammond of the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging at UCLA for assistance with preparing Fig. 2.
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Van Horn, J.D., Ishai, A. Mapping the Human Brain: New Insights from fMRI Data Sharing. Neuroinform 5, 146–153 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12021-007-0011-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12021-007-0011-6