Identification and Contact¶

Overview¶

The Austrian NeuroCloud (ANC) is a domain-specific, FAIR-enabling research data repository for cognitive neuroscience, hosted by the University of Salzburg. It provides data stewardship and tools for organizing, validating, curating, publishing, and sharing research datasets. Its mission and scope define the community it serves and its commitment to preservation and access.

The ANC has been in regular operations since the beginning of 2025. A core team of researchers, data stewards, and system administrators handles development, curation, and day-to-day operations, with two permanent positions funded by the University of Salzburg. The current operational focus is data onboarding. The ANC holds CoreTrustSeal certification valid until 2029.

The collections span neuroimaging, electrophysiology, behavioral and movement data, and phenotypic and questionnaire data, from single-modality studies to multi-year longitudinal projects. Explore the datasets hosted by the ANC in the ANC Data Interface. Datasets are organized using the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) and related formats described in the Data Format Requirements. Version control, automated validation, and metadata curation support datasets that continue to grow and change during research.

History¶

The ANC was developed in response to fragmented practices for storing, preserving, and reusing research data across laboratories, studies, and institutions. It began in 2020 as a digitization project funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research through its national digital and social transformation initiative (project description, p. 47). Initial work examined the research data lifecycle, selected a software framework, and developed workflows for data acquisition, organization, and metadata enrichment, tested with pilot datasets.

The Digital Neuroscience Initiative ran from 2021 to 2024 with funding from the State of Salzburg and complemented this work with expertise in law and computer science. It supported the development of legal and policy frameworks for neurocognitive data, a scientific knowledge graph linked to cognitive ontologies, and hardware infrastructure for data hosting, services, and computing.

In 2024, the ANC was selected for three FAIR-IMPACT support programs, which helped refine its policies, improve machine-actionable metadata, and prepare for interoperability with European infrastructures. Regular operations began in early 2025 with continuing support from the University of Salzburg. The institutional mandate provides the basis for this continuing role.

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