Making data accessible: a rebuild and expansion of BrainRNAseq.org

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Project Summary Big datasets are now a routine output for many studies. A corollary of this reality is the ever-growing need to disseminate this information to other scientists, a feat that presents its own challenges. Over 7 years ago, we found ourselves grappling with these very questions because we had generated a series of mouse and human datasets that we felt would greatly benefit the glial (and greater neuroscience) community. After many iterations, we developed a website called BrainRNAseq.org, a central source where other scientists could easily and quickly access our data—whether they were browsing at home, or while walking down the poster aisle at a meeting. Over time, this website has become a staple within our scientific community and currently garners over 250 users per day, with over 56,000 different users in the past 3 years alone. However, the site is in need of back-end repairs to ensure its utility for the foreseeable future. In the first aim of this proposal, we will rebuild the site while maintaining its user interface and adding user-requested upgrades. Our second aim is to build a free application that will enable other creators to build similar sites with ease. Creators will need no coding experience—only a .csv file with their data, and our application (Dataspectra 2.0) will provide a suite of simple aesthetic options to construct a user-friendly website where others can explore and download their data. Finally, to consolidate the growing number of datasets currently scattered across the web, we will create “Barreseq”—a central repositiory for glial datasets where trainees and faculty and quickly apply filters (species, data type, age, etc) to identify relevant datasets for their specific interests. We envision a paradigm in which data sharing moves towards standardization. We want to build the tools necessary to lower the activation energy for individuals to share their data, and to do so in a mechanism that is visually familiar and digestible to other users. We believe that this will strengthen our scientific community, both in terms of generating stronger hypotheses, and in the spirit of more easily sharing the valuable resources that everyone is producing.