Methodology & Labels

1What this guide is

The Open Neuroscience Starter Kit is a curated route through open neuroscience learning, written for graduate students and researchers in brain-related fields. Its premise is navigation through abundance: the open-science world already has no shortage of tutorials, courses and tools. What is scarce is a coherent, sequenced map of which of them to use, in what order, and why. The guide therefore curates and arranges existing resources rather than producing new raw material.

It is a collaboration of the Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform (CONP), the Tanenbaum Open Science Institute (TOSI) at The Neuro (McGill University), and the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF). The educational framing, the overall navigation-through-abundance philosophy, and the level-based sequencing originate with CONP, which also designed the original Open Neuroscience Starter Kit study track (hosted on INCF's training platform). This site is, to a large extent, a reboot of that project: the original study track's lessons are carried here individually as CONP–INCF-curated resources, and its structure and progression of materials inform the guided path. The learning-objective framework (the eight categories and their Bloom-based objectives) and much of the resource environmental scan come from TOSI's training & education working group; INCF contributes open-standards and technical-fluency training, and its TrainingSpace library of more than a thousand lessons. Resources and objective details are drawn from each partner, but the structure and pedagogy that organise them are CONP's.

This site is a public beta. It is undergoing development, review and quality control, and is open to feedback. Labels, structure and content are all subject to revision.

2How resources are selected & reviewed

The objective-to-resource collection behind this guide was built by an environmental scan of the open-science training landscape: candidate resources are mapped to specific learning objectives, and a mapping is treated as vetted only once it has been reviewed against the objective it serves.

Vetting is performed by more than one body, each with its own procedure, and it is independent of who produced the resource (see the label key below). At present two procedures are in use: TOSI runs a two-member quality review, in which two reviewers from its training & education working group check each entry; and CONP–INCF contributes entries vetted through the editorial curation behind the Open Neuroscience Starter Kit and INCF's standards & best-practice portfolio. Further reviewing bodies and procedures will be added here as the collection grows.

Where the scan leaves a gap (most often a missing orientation resource that should precede a specific tool), a provisional candidate may be found through AI-assisted research and marked AI-suggested (a provisional AI-research suggestion). These are starting points for review, not endorsements, and are deliberately flagged so a reviewer can confirm, replace, or remove them. Separately, a Review pending status marks genuine candidate resources, including several core neuroscience standards and repositories, that have simply not yet been through any review procedure: shown, but not claimed as vetted by anyone.

A note on balance: at present the objective-to-resource mappings are drawn predominantly from the TOSI environmental scan, with CONP–INCF curation contributing a growing share. Most of the individual resources are themselves community-produced (e.g. The Turing Way, The Carpentries) rather than made by any one partner. That is exactly why source and vetting are tracked as separate things. The source collection also carries a coarser internal provenance taxonomy on two axes: whether an entry originates inside the Alliance or outside it, and whether it is neuroscience-specific or field-agnostic. The guide uses it to keep a universal backbone while adapting the neuroscience layer to the reader's subfield.

The Explore library also includes the wider INCF TrainingSpace collection (about a thousand lessons, plus its courses, study tracks and collections, each listed as one entry). These are not uncurated: INCF's experts oversee what TrainingSpace includes. They are marked INCF library because they have not yet been reviewed by TOSI or CONP–INCF against a specific learning objective of this guide; the resources inside the guided path carry their objective-level review status as above.

The precise definition of a "vetted" entry (the exact criteria and bar for each reviewing body) is being finalised and will be stated here once settled.

3The label key

A resource card carries up to three labels, answering three different questions. Two of them, source (who contributed it) and vetting (whether and by whom it was reviewed), are independent axes and are read in their own columns below. The third, role, is the pedagogical job the resource does for the objective.

Source: who contributed or stewards the resource

Vetting: whether, by whom, and how it was reviewed

Source and vetting are independent. The source badge says who contributed the resource; the vetting badge says who reviewed it and how, never the other way round. So a resource can be Community-sourced yet ✓ CONP–INCF reviewed (BIDS, OpenNeuro, Docker and Zenodo are examples), or Community-sourced and ✓ TOSI reviewed (The Turing Way). Reading the two columns together tells you both where a resource comes from and how far it has been checked.

Language. Most resources are in English. Resources in another language are marked in their listing (for example, “in French”).

Resource role: the pedagogical job the resource does

Resources attached to an objective are sorted by role so you learn before you reach for a tool. The first three roles form an “understand the landscape” tier shown by default; the specific instruments sit one click beneath, behind a “show specific tools” expander.

This role layer is an addition of this guide. The underlying TOSI scan mapped resources to objectives as a flat, unordered list, with no field for a resource's role or granularity (verified in the source data). Several objectives therefore jumped straight to specific tools with no orientation step; tagging every resource by role, and sequencing concept → choosing → how-to → tool, is what repairs that.

4How objectives are structured

Open-science practice is divided into eight categories. Within each, granular learning objectives are written against Bloom's taxonomy, so an objective states a specific, assessable capability ("define…", "apply…", "design…") rather than a vague topic. The categories below show which are live in this beta. The two most recent, Community, mentorship & EDIA and Professional skills, were built in September 2026 from the corresponding TOSI objectives; several of their objectives are still waiting for reviewed resources.

The eighth category, Pathways to becoming an open-science mentor / trainer (Training-of-Trainers), is the least developed in the source collection (its tab is on hold at TOSI). For now it is folded into the Trainer level of the other areas rather than shown as a separate area; restoring it as its own category is a held option.

Level

Cutting across the categories, each objective is tagged with a progression level. This is a reader-facing facet, kept separate from the Bloom level recorded at source, though the two may later be mapped onto one another.

Bloom levels are tracked per objective in the source data; whether and how to surface them in the interface is still undecided, so the data model reserves the field but the UI does not yet show it.

5The two lenses

The path itself stays constant for every reader. Two lenses change how it is presented without changing the underlying objectives.

Research area and data types

You choose your research area in the controls row. The objectives do not change, but each research area ticks the data types it usually works with (for example, Systems & circuits ticks extracellular electrophysiology and calcium imaging), and you can tick or untick any of them under Data I work with. The For your data box in an objective then lists the tools for every ticked data type, merged without duplicates. At present this applies to the objectives on data standards, repositories and analysis pipelines (more are being added): the same objective points an MRI reader at BIDS and OpenNeuro, and an electrophysiology reader at NWB and DANDI. Ticking clinical and patient data adds a sensitive-data governance note.

Go deeper in your field

On objectives where the field matters (data standards, repositories, pipelines, documentation and similar), a Go deeper panel suggests up to three lessons or courses from the INCF TrainingSpace library that match both the objective and your data types. They are matched automatically by keyword and topic, then ranked by signals INCF itself provides: inclusion in an INCF study track or collection, featured courses, lessons promoted by INCF, recent updates and hands-on formats, with lessons that INCF marks as under review placed last. Each pick shows its reasons (“Why here”), is labelled INCF library, and has not yet been reviewed against the objective. Curated tools also show how many Neurostars forum topics discuss them, a sign of how much community help is available rather than of quality. The data-type labels are ours; matching runs through a crosswalk to INCF topics and openMINDS terms that can be re-run whenever those vocabularies change.

Academic / Beyond-academia lens

A toggle in the controls row reframes the whole path. In Academic view the transferable-skill breadcrumb on each objective stays subtle. In Beyond academia view it is foregrounded, and each area gains a summary of the transferable competency families its objectives build, and the concrete roles outside academia that value them. The competencies are an always-present property of each objective; the lens only changes how prominently they are shown. The lens is deliberately not labelled “research vs. career”: research is a career, and the same skills strengthen both paths. The toggle contrasts the academic framing with the beyond-academia one.

6Three ways in: Guided path, Browse and Explore

A first visit starts with Where do you want to start?, a choice of goals that opens the matching area in the Guided path. The areas are numbered in a suggested order, and some objectives show Builds on links to the objectives they rely on; both the order and these links are provisional and under review by the TOSI working group.

Guided path walks one open-science area objective by objective, in the recommended order, remembers where you were, continues into the next area at the end of one, and keeps track of what you have opened (which you can clear). Each level has its own colour (green for Beginner, blue for Practitioner, purple for Trainer), used on the Level buttons and on each objective’s badge; objectives above your chosen level appear at the end of the path, grouped under their level in its colour, and selecting one switches to that level. Long lists show up to five resources at first, picked across the groups, with a button to show them all. Browse shows all the objectives of an area at once, each with its resources grouped as Understand it → Choose one → Do it → Tools. Both use the curated set, and both adapt the data-type-specific tools to the research area you pick.

Explore library is the search-and-browse view over everything: the curated resources plus the INCF TrainingSpace library. It opens by neuroscience area (eleven areas plus field-agnostic) and also offers open-science skill or project stage (plan → collect → organize → analyze → share → publish → reuse). Ctrl-click (⌘-click on a Mac) combines several areas, skills or stages. A search box, tolerant of hyphens and spelling variants, and filters for collection, level, reviewer, format and contributor narrow any of them. Curated resources take their skill area, stages and levels from the objectives that use them; INCF lessons carry first-pass tags from our crosswalks of the TrainingSpace catalogue, which are reviewable and will be refined.

Every view keeps its place in the page address, so the browser's Back button moves between views and any view can be bookmarked or shared (for example, #mode=explore opens the Explore library).

7Versioning & archival

All objectives, resources and mappings live in a single versioned data file that is the source of truth for the interface. The page shell never changes when the content is refreshed; only the dated data file is swapped. Refreshes are planned on a regular cadence.

Each dated version is intended to be deposited on the Open Science Framework (OSF) as the citable record, with the site referencing that deposit's DOI. The collection is a living document: the working group plans to engage the wider community to refine objectives and fill gaps over time.

8Status & contributing

This is a public beta, still undergoing development, review and quality control. Nothing here is a final endorsement: resource choices, labels and sequencing are all provisional, and the AI-suggested entries in particular are placeholders awaiting review.

Feedback on the structure, the labels, or specific resource mappings is welcome and is exactly what this stage is for. A formal channel for contributing objectives and resources will be added here as the living document moves onto OSF.

9Link health

Every resource link is re-tested periodically; the most recent results are summarised below. Resources that need a free account are additionally labelled in their listing (“free account needed”). The check covers the curated resources of the guided path; the INCF library links in Explore are maintained by INCF.