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Category: Project

Description: About one-third of all data sets (N = 640) being shared on OpenNeuro in the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) are missing data about participants. Among the two-thirds with a participants.tsv, only roughly half of them have a participants.json despite existing tools to create BIDS-compliant sidecar files such as PyNIDM. Only a startling 2.3% of datasets have phenotypic or assessment data. Participant data (e.g. age), phenotype data (e.g. blood tests), and assessment data (e.g. responses to a survey), collectively referred to here as phenotypic data, are regularly collected, but data wranglers are not always equipped to put these data into a shareable format. While they put these data into dataframe objects for analysis purposes, they rarely write reproducible code to export them as tabular data. Another aspect influencing data structure and, indirectly, sharing is big longitudinal study design (e.g. ABCD, HCP, and UK Biobank), which is increasingly common. Assuming sharing data is allowed, the main self-reported barriers to FAIR-principled data sharing include being too time-consuming, lack of funding, and lack of knowledge. This project aims to expand on the current BIDS standards for phenotypic data with guidelines, and public tools.