What is the CONP?
Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform (CONP) aims to make neuroscience research, data, and tools accessible to everyone, with the ultimate objective of accelerating scientific discovery and its eventual translation to disease treatments. The CONP takes a multi-faceted approach to enabling open science in the field of neuroscience, including:
- the CONP Portal, which allows datasets, analysis tools, and experiments to be shared in accordance with FAIR principles
- NeuroLibre, the CONP’s open publishing platform, which publishes reproducible papers with their data, code and full computing environment, so that readers can re-run the analyses behind them; its successor, Evidence, extends the model to all the sciences and is in public beta
- governance frameworks and toolkits for an ethically sound data-sharing policy that strikes a balance between safe-guarding the rights of data subjects and promoting widespread public benefit from scientific advancement; the Portal’s Data Governance page sets out how the CONP governs the data it holds
- training and education resources for open-science practice, gathered on our Resources & Training page.
Taken together, these elements embody the CONP vision for promoting Open Science practices in neuroscience, with attendant benefits for brain researchers and the wider community.
Read more about the CONP in our paper, The Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform—An open science framework for the neuroscience community (PLOS Computational Biology, 2023), about the Portal in Data and Tools Integration in the Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform (Scientific Data, 2023), and about its approach to data governance in Open Data Governance at the Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform (CONP): From the Walled Garden to the Arboretum (GigaScience, 2024).
The CONP supports Canada’s basic neuroscience and clinical neuroscience research communities to:
- share phenotypic/genotypic data and methods in an unrestricted manner
- create large-scale databases impossible to achieve within a single institution
- facilitate the use of advanced multivariate analytic strategies
- disseminate findings to the global community
- train the next generation of computational neuroscience researchers
Open Science is a growing movement which aims to make scientific research and data accessible to everyone. Open Science is an umbrella term which covers the open dissemination of data, manuscripts, software, materials, methodologies, and other outputs scientists produce in their research. Open Science also aims to make the scientific process more transparent and accessible.
Open Science is widely considered to be beneficial for scientists, patients, and the public at large and is strongly supported by a broad cross-section of entities including UNESCO and WHO, as well as different levels of the Canadian government. Its advantages include:
- greater availability and accessibility of publicly funded scientific research outputs
- possibility for rigorous peer-review processes
- greater reproducibility and transparency of scientific works
- greater impact of scientific research
- greater public implication in the conduct and fruits of scientific research
Many challenges in the field of neuroscience may be helped by adopting open-science practices. Sharing research findings and outputs openly can move things along more quickly to find answers to many key questions in neuroscience. There is a critical, unmet clinical need for treatments for many brain-related illnesses, in particular neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Open Science can help drive discovery of therapeutics for these diseases, helping to find innovative solutions more quickly.
Since March 2025, the CONP has been funded by a Brain Canada Platform Support Grant (Platform Support Grants 2024, through August 2028), with matching funds from the Ludmer Centre for Neuroinformatics and Mental Health and the Marc and Susie Sievers Computational Neuroscience Initiative. The Digital Research Alliance of Canada provides in-kind cloud resources on Arbutus for NeuroLibre and Evidence.
The CONP was founded with a grant from Brain Canada in partnership with Health Canada, announced in February 2018. Its first funding period ended in 2022. Over the years its funders and sponsors have also included McGill/MNI Tanenbaum Open Science Institute, Fonds de Recherche du Québec, Ontario Brain Institute/Rotman Research Institute, École Polytechnique, Institut de Cardiologie de Montréal, Western University, McLaughlin Centre/University of Toronto, Université Laval, University of Calgary, Douglas Hospital Research Foundation, Human Brain Project, University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, Concordia University, Dell/EMC, IBM, Compute Canada (now the Digital Research Alliance of Canada) and Quebec Bio-Imaging Network. See our Funders page.
This Project has been made possible with the financial support of the Canada Brain Research Fund (CBRF), an innovative arrangement between the Government of Canada (through Health Canada) and Brain Canada Foundation, and McGill University.
The CONP has three main components:
- Administrative structure
- Committees
- Members
For general information, to financially contribute to the CONP as a donor or to collaborate scientifically as a partner organization, please email us at: info@conp.ca
If you would like to access or share data or pipelines as an individual or organization, please visit the portal at https://portal.conp.ca
For technical assistance or to learn more about the CONP Portal, please visit https://portal.conp.ca/contact_us
If you would like to publish a reproducible paper, please visit https://neurolibre.org
The CONP Platform: the First Four Years and Looking Ahead
Professor Alan C. Evans reflects on the first four years of the Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform (CONP) in this November 2021 Brain Canada video. Professor Evans salutes Brain Canada for showing “… a lot of vision in committing to the idea of open science and funding the CONP …” to build a large-scale, national effort to reduce the barriers to open data-sharing and open workflows in the Canadian neuroscience community, both of which are key to pioneering research programs and accelerating discovery.
Dr. Evans also noted the importance of the next generation of neuroscientists in this process, looking upon their comfort with open science and data sharing with envy: “I really wish I could start over again now.”