Mission and Scope¶

The Austrian NeuroCloud (ANC) is explicitly committed to the long-term preservation and accessibility of digital research data in cognitive neuroscience. It was established to enable sustainable, FAIR-compliant research data management and to support the broader goals of open and reproducible science.

ANC’s mission is publicly available on the ANC website, in this handbook, and linked to the ANC re3data registry entry.

Mission Statement¶

The Austrian NeuroCloud (ANC) is a FAIR-enabling repository designed to support sustainable research data management in cognitive neuroscience. The ANC is committed to the long-term preservation, accessibility, and FAIR stewardship of cognitive neuroscience research data. As a domain-specific, open repository, the ANC enables researchers to manage and share data across the entire research lifecycle, from acquisition and curation to publication and reuse.

The repository serves the cognitive neuroscience research community, with particular attention to the needs of Austrian institutions and publicly funded science, while remaining open to international collaborators. Through its stewardship framework and dedicated team, the ANC ensures that data remains curated, documented, and accessible for the long term, supporting reproducibility and future discovery.

The ANC was developed in response to fragmented and inconsistent practices in storing, preserving, and reusing research data across labs, studies, and institutions. From its inception, it aimed to offer a comprehensive, standards-based platform tailored to the workflows and challenges of cognitive neuroscience.

Initiated in 2020 with funding from the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research (BMBWF), the ANC began as part of a national digitization initiative focused on advancing digital and social transformation in higher education. Initial work focused on analyzing the research data lifecycle, selecting an appropriate software framework, and designing workflows for data acquisition, organization, and metadata enrichment. These were tested through pilot datasets to ensure practical applicability.

To broaden its scope, the Digital Neuroscience Initiative (DNI) was launched in 2021 with funding from the State of Salzburg. This complementary effort introduced expertise from law and computer science, enabling the ANC to:

• Develop legal and policy frameworks for handling neurocognitive data, including GDPR and Austrian FOG compliance
• Build a scientific knowledge graph linked to cognitive ontologies for domain-specific querying
• Acquire the hardware infrastructure necessary to host ANC data and services, including an integrated computing environment

In 2024, the ANC was selected for three FAIR-IMPACT support programs, where it refined its policies, enhanced support for machine-actionable metadata, and prepared for interoperability with European infrastructures.

Now in 2025, the ANC is transitioning into regular operations with continuing support from its host institution, the University of Salzburg. The ANC has been included in the university’s performance agreement with the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research as a national infrastructure for the preservation of (neuro)scientific data, and supports the ANC through with institutional infrastructure and legal frameworks, as well as through the funding of two permanent positions.

Beside support from university, ANC has also been included in the EOSC Macro Roadmap and in the INCF infrastructure registry, reflecting its strategic role in the global open science ecosystem.

Looking ahead, the ANC is preparing for integration with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and actively contributes to community standards, projects, and initiatives. It is committed to ensuring that datasets are discoverable, interoperable, and integrated with relevant national and international infrastructures. The platform supports an increasing number of datasets, ranging from small-scale exploratory studies to large, multi-year longitudinal projects, from both Austrian and international research institutions.

By combining domain-specific insight with legal, technical, and institutional support, the ANC is establishing itself as a cornerstone of Austria’s neuroscience data infrastructure — and a model for trusted, FAIR-aligned data stewardship across Europe.

Designated community¶

The Austrian NeuroCloud (ANC) serves neuroscience community in general and specializes in cognitive neuroscience. An initial focus is on Austrian research community. This national orientation reflects both the project's origins in a digitization initiative 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)), and its alignment with the Austrian Research Organization Act (FOG) and European data protection regulations (GDPR). While the repository is open to datasets without Austrian affiliation, its technical and legal infrastructure continues to reflect these foundational frameworks, ensuring secure and compliant data stewardship.

Cognitive Neuroscience is an interdisciplinary field spanning psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, computer science, and philosophy. The research community is diverse but shares the common challenge of working with complex datasets - often acquired over long periods and consisting of multiple modalities such as neuroimaging, electrophysiology, behavioral, and phenotypic data. These datasets are difficult to integrate and reuse due to inconsistencies in format, structure, contextual metadata, and limited knowledge of the relevant legal and ethical frameworks for handling sensitive data.

To support this community, ANC enforces the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) as a foundation for syntactic interoperability and promotes domain-specific metadata for semantic clarity. Metadata is aligned with both general-purpose standards (DataCite, CITATION.cff) and neuroscience-specific schemas (BIDS, Hierarchical Event Descriptors (HED), Neurobagel Data Model), enabling both human and machine-readable integration across studies. By supporting metadata curation from dataset-level information (e.g., authors, data types) down to experimental details (e.g., event descriptions, questionnaire items) the ANC fosters data reuse. Typical reuse scenarios include meta- and mega-analyses that pool harmonized datasets, secondary analyses to test new or refined hypotheses, and teaching or training on well-documented, standards-compliant data. This reduces the need for costly and time-intensive new data collection—such as participant recruitment and scanner time—while increasing the scientific and ethical value of existing datasets.

The designated community is assumed to operate primarily in English and includes researchers in cognitive neuroscience and related disciplines, undergraduate and graduate students, data stewards, and all professionals engaged in neuroscience data management across the research data lifecycle, with an initial focus on the Austrian research community while also welcoming datasets without Austrian affiliation, particularly in this growth phase. To support all users, including experts in the field and newcomers to neuroscience data management, the ANC provides a comprehensive handbook with documentation and hands-on data stewardship to guide data deposition and curation. A user-friendly web interface ensures accessibility even for those with limited technical infrastructure or experience.

Ongoing collaboration between ANC data stewards and the broader cognitive neuroscience community (including BIDS, HED, and Neurobagel) ensures that the repository stays aligned with evolving FAIR standards. The data stewards maintain a related work catalog (update to community monitoring) for active monitoring of the domain and other relevant resources and engage in continuous communication with users (link to community meetings) to understand their needs and provide tailored support. This dynamic interaction helps the ANC adapt its services and curation practices to best serve the community's changing requirements.

Mission operationalization and endorsement¶

The ANC's mission is operationalized through a set of publicly approved governance and stewardship policies hosted in the ANC Handbook, including:

• Data Stewardship Policy,
• Transfer and License Agreement

These documents define the repository's responsibility for curation, preservation, and provision of access to research datasets across the data lifecycle.

The mission has also received formal institutional and national-level endorsement. The ANC is explicitly referenced in the Performance Agreement between the University of Salzburg and the Austrian Federal Ministry of Women, Science and Research (Leistungsvereinbarung 2025-2027; B2.2., Nr. 5) as a key national infrastructure:

"The University of Salzburg promotes the development and operation of digital repositories to support Open Data and FAIR research data management. The research data repository Austrian NeuroCloud is to be permanently established and made available across locations for the storage of neuroscientific research data." (translated from German)

Furthermore, the Development Plan of the University of Salzburg for 2025–2030 (Entwicklungsplan 2025-2030; Section 3.3) includes a commitment to the long-term operation of the Austrian NeuroCloud:

"As part of a cooperation project funded through the BMBWF call 'Digital and Social Transformation', the Austrian NeuroCloud (ANC) digital data repository was developed and is intended to be continued. The ANC is to be made available across institutions for research and teaching in the field of cognitive neuroscience, and to enable the storage, management, and analysis of neurocognitive data. In coordination with the FAIR Reference Point of PLUS, the ANC will offer discipline-specific research data management services (e.g., for the appropriate organization, annotation, description, and licensing of neurocognitive data) and will undergo certification. The goal is to permanently establish the ANC as a FAIR and trustworthy data repository and enable its integration into the EOSC." (translated from German)

In addition, the ANC is included on the EOSC Macro Roadmap and listed in the Infrastructure Registry of the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF), further affirming its recognition within the broader European and international Open Science landscape.

Together, these elements provide clear evidence that ANC’s mission to preserve and provide access to digital research objects is not only explicit and public but also approved at multiple levels and aligned with national and European strategic priorities.