OpenNeuro.org

OpenNeuro traces back to OpenfMRI, a project Russell Poldrack started in 2010 to let researchers openly share raw fMRI datasets, at a time when almost no infrastructure existed for that in neuroimaging. It ran for several years as a straightforward repository: labs uploaded raw data, and others could download it, but there was no shared standard for how that data should be organized or described. That changed with the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS), a metadata and file-organization standard developed by Poldrack's group and collaborators, which gave neuroimaging data a common, machine-readable structure for the first time. Once BIDS existed, the OpenfMRI team rebuilt the platform around it: in early 2018 OpenNeuro was launched. OpenNeuro was subsequently supported by the NIH BRAIN Initiative, and is an official NIH BRAIN Data Archive. OpenNeuro is housed at Stanford University and is currently run by Russ Poldrack and Josh Buckholtz.

Investment can close specific, measurable gaps between OpenNeuro's current state and its mission of making neuroimaging data genuinely reusable. First, multi-year, non-cycle-bound funding would let the team maintain security and staffing continuity beyond its current five-year NIH R24 grant. Second, storage and bandwidth investment removes a cost ceiling that scales with dataset growth, a structural risk for a public good with no independent revenue stream. Third, funding for derivatives (preprocessed, analysis-ready outputs like fMRIPrep pipelines) and metadata standardization (e.g. CEDAR ontology integration) drives actual reuse, not just deposits, the truer measure of mission success. Fourth, investment in the underlying BIDS data standard benefits the whole neuroimaging ecosystem, not OpenNeuro alone. OpenNeuro has drawn over $8 million in NIH support and shows rising dataset reuse in published research, evidence the model works and warrants sustained, not year-to-year, investment.