Janis L Breeze; Jean-Baptiste Poline; David N Kennedy

“ Data papers should describe in detail how the data was acquired, with which goals and constraints, an assessment of their quality, how they have and how they can or should be reused, how to get access, give feedback and credit. Datasets are technical and critical building blocks of science and should be recognized as such by high impact and heavy citation, ensuring that creators of data are appropriately acknowledged for their work. ”

“ The impact of widespread data sharing on our field should be enormous—it will provide better training opportunities to students by enabling them to work with large amounts of real data; it will alter our interpretation and understanding of the variability of brain function; it will lead to better reporducibility and stronger data analysis and interpretations ”

“ A greater challenge will be the current academic and funding framework in which most researchers exist, which equates career advancement with some count of peer-reviewed publications. Given this climate, it is a great step forward for the community that peer-reviewed journals are now offering an article type devoted to the description and publication of data, along with recommendation of organizations such as DataCite. ”

“ In particular, a lack of standards, recommendations, and interoperable and easy-to-use tools for sharing is lacking. In an attempt to improve this situation, the group is working on four projects to be completed by the end of 2012. ”