Open Science

Our unit is also at the forefront of open-science efforts. The Open MEG Archive (OMEGA) is the fruit of a collaborative effort between our program and the Université de Montréal to provide a core repository of MEG data for open dissemination. It now contains multimodal data from over 200 participants, about 300 resting-state MEG records. It also features anatomical T1-weighted MRI volumes and anonymized demographic and questionnaire data. OMEGA will continue to expand, with contributions from the scientific community.

The Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) is an emerging standard for the harmonization of neuroimaging data, to which we contributed to extend to MEG. The MEG-BIDS specifications were defined in accord with best-practice guidelines for conducting MEG research, with direct inputs from MEG investigators, technical support staff and data managers. All MEG data collected at our unit is automatically organized according to BIDS when copied from the acquisition system to our storage server, where researchers access their recordings.