The studyforrest.org project aims to foster collaborative open science projects investigating the brain’s behavior and neural representations under quasi natural stimulation conditions. After the initial data acquisition in 2013 and the first release in 2014, it has grown into a versatile and unique resource with multiple follow-up data releases,
26 published articles, and 16 published studies employing this dataset that were conducted by independent groups (so far).
This talk will briefly summarize the goals of the project and present conclusions on the benefits and disappointments of this open science effort, as they appear five years after its start. In particular, the talk will introduce a data management software solution, DataLad (http://datalad.org) that was developed based on lessons learned from the studyforrest.org project. The talk argues that this tool provides unique features that benefit any research effort (large or small, collaborative or not) that needs to break the boundaries of time, individual labs, research domains or field of expertise.