BIDS extends into EEG and iEEG. OpenNeuro to support EEG and iEEG data sharing.

March 11, 2019

We are excited to announce BIDS now supports EEG (electroencephalography) and iEEG (intracranial electrophysiology) raw data organization! You will now be able to validate your EEG and iEEG datasets. With this extension, you will also be able to submit and download EEG and iEEG datasets on OpenNeuro. You can find preprints of the BIDS-EEG and BIDS-iEEG extensions. The development process that began as an idea among researchers and concluded with the extension merged into the main BIDS specification and enabled data submissions to OpenNeuro is a fascinating scientific process and an excellent case of open science and collaboration.

This initiative began in the spring of 2017 by Drs. Dora Hermes and Cyril Pernet in a publicly shared google doc that was able to collect feedback across the community to create the most complete specification taking into account many different perspectives and opinions. This method allowed for researchers around the world to provide their suggestions and lower the barrier to contributing. There is not a formal governance hierarchy beyond extension leads so anyone can comment and contribute their ideas equally (which is very appreciated!). As the extension evolved and expanded, it progressively became spearheaded by Drs. Dora Hermes, Cyril Pernet, Chris Holdgraf, Robert Oostenveld, and Stefan Appelhoff. The google doc was iterated over and meticulously edited over a period of a year and a half taking into account community feedback. Once the google doc reached consensus, the working group was ready to transform the material into a manuscript and submit the markdown file as a pull request on the bids-specification github. This pull request was further discussed to ensure consistency with the rest of the main bids specification for a couple of months. The pull request was approved and merged in February of 2019. This marked the end of the long journey to complete their initial goal of extending BIDS into EEG and iEEG data. Looking forward, work is currently underway to extend this organization into common electrophysiological derivatives. If you are interested, please feel free to join the discussion and voice your perspective! It is also being envisioned that along with archiving of electrophysiological data there will be a more extensive tool to support data visualization, analysis, and meta-analysis.

Please find example EEG and iEEG datasets. We will be sending EEG OpenNeuro stickers (pictured below) to the authors of the first 10 EEG/iEEG datasets uploaded to OpenNeuro. When the upload has completed and the dataset has been made public please email Franklin at ffein@stanford.edu with your dataset URL and mailing address to enter. If you have any questions please feel free to email Franklin.

EEG_OpenNeuro

 

If you are interested in extending the BIDS specification into a domain not currently being undertaken, please feel free to start one! The process for doing this can be found in our contributing guide.

We would like to extend a special thank you and congratulations to Dora Hermes, Cyril Pernet, Chris Holdgraf, Robert Oostenveld, Stefan Appelhoff and the entire EEG and iEEG working group for your excellent work and countless hours of spirited discussions!

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