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Howdy. Humble neuroinformatics lab knave here. While it's nice that you've made your data available, you might want to reconsider including the PHI. Many researchers are not interested in your phone number / where you live past the recruitment stage, and even then that information is kept confidential in accordance with IRB policies and HIPAA. The only data that a researcher might want to know is whether there are any phenotypes associated with your data (e.g., autism, ADHD, other stable traits, etc) or, in the case of task-related data, when certain blocks or events started/stopped and for how long. Even with phenotyping data, we are very cautious about how we go about sharing since we don't want to violate anyone's privacy (see here: http://fcon_1000.projects.nitrc.org/indi/enhanced/sharing.ht...). This is very important for individuals with conditions that are stigmatized in society- we don't want to make someone's life worse by outing them as being autistic, bipolar or depressed for instance. In light of what I've said above, I will also express my disagreement with your philosophy. I do not believe that is natural for information to converge to a single point- in fact, many corporations rely on information asymmetries to gain an upper-hand in the market. The internet may reduce such information asymmetry, but it is unlikely that it will eliminate it completely (unless humanity turns into the Borg and creates a hive mind). Indeed so long as human thought is decentralized with separate minds in separate bodies, information asymmetry will remain the default. Moving along, I want to note that a chief goal of science is to seek truths that are generalizable to the population at large. A single DTI series isn't really useful for achieving that goal since you can't determine how it relates to scans from a number of other participants(i.e., a 1st-level analysis is not a 2nd-level analysis; a case study is not a wider truth about cognition). In that sense, it might be better to see if there is a databank willing to accept your scan and donate your data to that so that you could be part of a broader sample. More pragmatically, you might also want to consider using the NifTI format for your data, since this is the format that researchers use when processing data in various neuroimaging suites (i.e., Freesurfer, AFNI, SPM, FSL, etc). You may also want to consider organizing your data according to the Brain Imaging Data Structure standard, as many datasets are moving towards this (http://bids.neuroimaging.io/) and software tools are being written to take advantage of this structure. Finally: Under no circumstances was this done in the name of art. That doesn’t mean that it can’t contribute to art (:P)- http://www.neurobureau.org/galleries/brain-art-competition-2... |