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Overview¶

The Austrian NeuroCloud (ANC) is a FAIR-enabling platform designed to support sustainable research data management in cognitive neuroscience. It facilitates the entire lifecycle of neuroscientific data, from acquisition and storage to validation, metadata curation, publishing, and sharing. The platform equips researchers with essential tools to ensure data integrity and compliance with community standards. By providing controlled access to research data, the ANC ensures adherence to data protection laws. The ANC aligns its development with European Open Science Cloud policies and has been recently included in the EOSC Macro-Roadmap.

The ANC was originally developed as a digitization project funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research (Digitale und soziale Transformation: ausgewählte Digitalisierungsvorhaben an öffentlichen Universitäten 2020 bis 2024 (p. 47)), aimed at advancing open and reproducible neuroscience. It is now transitioning to regular operations, supported by its host institution, the University of Salzburg. The ANC is operated by a Core Team of researchers, data stewards, and system administrators who are responsible for the repository's development, curation, and day-to-day operations. Two of these positions are permanent and funded by the University of Salzburg. In addition, the broader ANC community contributes through activities such as advisory input, community meetings, and ambassador roles.

Neuroscientific research generates complex datasets composed of diverse data types collected over extended periods. The ANC currently hosts over 20 highly curated datasets, with sizes reaching up to 1 TB. These datasets follow the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS), a community standard for organizing neuroscientific data, and include neuroimaging (MRI, EEG, MEG), behavioral data, electrophysiology, and phenotypic information. The repository supports datasets ranging from small-scale, single-modality studies to large, multi-year longitudinal projects that integrate multiple data types.

The ANC is designed to support the dynamic nature of neuroscientific data, which often involves ongoing acquisition, updates, and continuous curation. Its infrastructure ensures version control, automated validation, and metadata completeness, allowing seamless integration of datasets into broader research contexts. To enhance metadata interoperability and long-term reusability, the ANC adopts widely accepted standards, both general-purpose (DataCite and JSON-LD) and domain-specific (BIDS, Hierarchical Event Descriptors, Neurobagel Data Model). By streamlining validation and standardization, the platform improves the FAIRness of datasets while reducing the manual effort required from researchers, enabling them to focus on scientific discovery without technical overhead.

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