What Practices Promote FAIR Science?

Adoption of BIDS format and enriching with Metadata are some very powerful ways to make data FAIR.

Utilizing BIDS Format

BIDS (or Brain Imaging Data Structure) is the standard directory structure for brain imaging data. This structure is shown below.

\project\data\subject\session\modality\file.type

Using BIDS will make your research more FAIR. It will also make you more efficient, since you will unlock benefits of using the BIDS ecosystem software such as pipelining. Want to learn more? Check out these pages about BIDS format, the Benefits of Using BIDS format, and BIDS apps.

Providing Metadata

Your dataset should provide the information necessary to understand and use it: this is called metadata.

The metadata you provide should answer the 5 W s:

  1. Who - Who comprised your sample?
  2. What - What measures did you use?
  3. When - What year did you collect the data?
  4. Where - What institute did you collect the data at?
  5. Why - What question were you trying to answer?

Providing answers to these questions in the metadata will enable other researchers to determine what they can do with your data. Want to learn more? Check out this page on Metadata guidlines at Radboud University.

Archiving Datasets to Public Repositories

When it is possible, you should make your data publicly available. For all Donderians, you will be archiving to http://data.ru.nl