By Meryem Yücel and David Boas

As a community, we always encourage data sharing. The availability of openly accessible data both facilitates the reproducibility of the research findings, but, as importantly, opens up opportunities for new discoveries and interpretations without the repetition of the work. Now, we have a great platform to do just that!

We (Stephen Tucker, Jeonghoon Choi, and David Boas) have started a meta-database specific to fNIRS data.  The “Openfnirs meta-database” (https://openfnirs.org/data/) is a part of the openfnirs initiative whose mission is to foster the development of an fNIRS ecosystem and to promote the open dissemination of fNIRS hardware and software, as well as provide access to resources, documentation and training opportunities for fNIRS users.

We strongly encourage you to consider sharing your data with community through whatever online forum best meets your needs. Then let us know about it so that we can include it in the openfnirs meta-database to help others find all available open datasets from a central location. If you have previously posted your data on a repository, you can provide the link along with other additional required information (publications, experimental paradigm etc) that are necessary for the analysis of the data. Please note that, the data must be anonymized, and data share should be approved by your IRB. Consider sharing your data in the Shared Near Infrared File Format (SNIRF, https://github.com/fNIRS/snirf ) which is aimed at standardizing the fNIRS data format in order to facilitate data share across labs using different fNIRS systems.

The Openfnirs database is our community’s platform, we would like to hear your feedback so that we can further improve it, and, of course, we are looking forward to sharing your valuable data with the community through it!