Toward neuroinformatics of neuroimaging data sharing and open brain science

In the late 1980s, fusions of advances in both neuroscience and information science gave birth to neuroinformatics with a core mission to informationize the complex brain structure and function and build the database. Three decades of neuroinformatics has witnessed the rapid progression on the in-vivo brain mapping technologies for monitoring and recording high-resolution spatial and temporal properties of such a complex informatic system non-invasively. Comparable to “Apollo Lunar Exploration” and “Manhattan Project” in the last century, brain projects became a national-wide arena for scientific frontiers in early 2000s. The most recent decade paralleled the remarkable development of the non-invasive and in-vivo human brain imaging technologies. Magnetic resonance imaging has made significant progresses on the basic research for understanding the human behavior and brain. This generated huge amount of in-vivo neuroimaging data and waved a new cycle of neuroinformatic research frontiers in life sciences, “open neuroscience” or “open brain science” featured by neuroimaging data sharing. In this review, we surveyed the history, state and future of neuroimaging data-sharing and the open brain science.