The OpenScope project has two aims: to establish a sustainable open-access platform and to foster a community of researchers around it. To achieve this goal, we need to solicit ideas for experimental proposals in a way that encourages community involvement.
A new community proposal track: The OpenScope steering committee discussed testing a new community proposal track where one proposal would be written and selected through an open-access and collaborative process. We hope that this approach will encourage the sharing and communication of ideas between teams. Publicly drafting proposals on a public forum like the Allen Institute Brain Map Community forum would also increase awareness and transparency in the community on how to leverage the OpenScope observatory.
Designing a community experimental proposal on a public forum in systems neuroscience has never been attempted. We propose limiting this process to one potential open-access project in 2023-2024; the 3 remaining projects will be selected by the standard double-blinded selection track.
The community proposal will be drafted on this forum, using the Allen Institute Brain Map Community forum. To kickstart this process on the forum, we will create a set of threads for different scientific questions and conduct a series of polls on the forum to determine the most impactful topics. Once we have a list of topics, we will create dedicated groups of threads for each topic and link a shared document to each one. The shared document will be formatted from a template that contains all the required information to finalize an experiment on our platform. Registered users on the platform will be given access to the document. Edits to the document will be made in suggestion mode with final merge by the OpenScope team.
Data release of the community call: There will be no embargo period on the resulting data. All collected data will be made available after basic data validation by the OpenScope operational teams. Data analysis will be performed by any interested scientists in the community. The OpenScope team will describe the dataset in an elife publication submission along with the data posted on DandiArchive.