Open-source tools for systems neuroscience

Open-source tools are gaining an increasing foothold in neuroscience. The rising complexity of experiments in systems neuroscience has led to a need for multiple parts of experiments to work together seamlessly. This means that open-source tools that freely interact with each other and can be understood and modified more easily allow scientists to conduct better experiments with less effort than closed tools. Open Ephys is an organization with team members distributed all around the world. Our mission is to advance our understanding of the brain by promoting community ownership of the tools we use to study it. We are making and distributing cutting edge tools that exploit modern technology to bring down the price and complexity of neuroscience experiments. A large component of this is to take tools that were developed in academic labs and helping with documentation, support, and distribution. More recently, we have been working on bringing high-quality manufacturing, distribution, warranty, and support to open source tools by partnering with OEPS in Portugal. We are now also establishing standards that make it possible to combine methods, such as miniaturized microscopes, electrode drive implants, and silicon probes seamlessly in one system. In the longer term, our development of new tools, interfaces and our standardization efforts have the goal of making it possible for scientists to easily run complex experiments that span from complex behaviors and tasks, multiple recording modalities, to easy access to data processing pipelines.

A discussion on the necessity for Open Source Hardware in neuroscience research

Research tools are paramount for scientific development, they enable researchers to observe and manipulate natural phenomena, learn their principles, make predictions and develop new technologies, treatments and improve living standards. Due to their costs and the geographical distribution of manufacturing companies access to them is not widely available, hindering the pace of research, the ability of many communities to contribute to science and education and reap its benefits. One possible solution for this issue is to create research tools under the open source ethos, where all documentation about them (including their designs, building and operating instructions) are made freely available. Dubbed Open Science Hardware (OSH), this production method follows the established and successful principles of open source software and brings many advantages over traditional creation methods such as: economic savings (see Pearce 2020 for potential economic savings in developing open source research tools), distributed manufacturing, repairability, and higher customizability. This development method has been greatly facilitated by recent technological developments in fast prototyping tools, Internet infrastructure, documentation platforms and lower costs of electronic off-the-shelf components. Taken together these benefits have the potential to make research more inclusive, equitable, distributed and most importantly, more reliable and reproducible, as - 1) researchers can know their tools inner workings in minute detail - 2) they can calibrate their tools before every experiment and having them running in optimal condition everytime - 3) given their lower price point, a)students can be trained/taught with hands on classes, b) several copies of the same instrument can be built leading to a parallelization of data collection and the creation of more robust datasets. - 4) Labs across the world can share the exact same type of instruments and create collaborative projects with standardized data collection and sharing.

INCF: enabling open and FAIR neuroscience

African Neuroscience: Current Status and Prospects

Understanding the function and dysfunction of the brain remains one of the key challenges of our time. However, an overwhelming majority of brain research is carried out in the Global North, by a minority of well-funded and intimately interconnected labs. In contrast, with an estimated one neuroscientist per million people in Africa, news about neuroscience research from the Global South remains sparse. Clearly, devising new policies to boost Africa’s neuroscience landscape is imperative. However, the policy must be based on accurate data, which is largely lacking. Such data must reflect the extreme heterogeneity of research outputs across the continent’s 54 countries. We have analysed all of Africa’s Neuroscience output over the past 21 years and uniquely verified the work performed in African laboratories. Our unique dataset allows us to gain accurate and in-depth information on the current state of African Neuroscience research, and to put it into a global context. The key findings from this work and recommendations on how African research might best be supported in the future will be discussed.

“Changing Memory on the Fly, re-evaluation of learned behaviour I n Drosophila” “Metabolic Regulation of Neural Stem Cells” “The answer is in the sauce”

Open Neuroscience: Challenging scientific barriers with Open Source & Open Science tools

The Open Science movement advocates for more transparent, equitable and reliable science. It focusses on improving existing infrastructures and spans all aspects of the scientific process, from implementing systems that reward pre-registering studies and guarantee their publication, all the way to making research data citable and freely available. In this context, open source tools (and the development ethos supporting them) are becoming more and more present in academic labs, as researchers are realizing that they can improve the quality of their work, while cutting costs. In this talk an overview of OS tools for neuroscience will be given, with a focus on software and hardware, and how their use can bring scientific independence and make research evolve faster.