Mission and vision
Mission
Section titled “Mission”NEMAR’s mission is to make human neuroelectromagnetic data findable, understandable, citable, and reusable.
That means more than placing files in a bucket. A useful research resource also explains what the files contain, preserves their context, supports quality checks, exposes stable machine-readable interfaces, and gives researchers a precise way to cite the state they used.
Vision
Section titled “Vision”Our vision is a research environment where a scientist can move from a question to a trustworthy dataset, a reproducible analysis, and a precise citation without rebuilding the infrastructure around every study or downloading everything before learning whether it is relevant.
NEMAR is being developed as an open, community-facing resource with NIH/NIMH support. The work is aligned with the goals of the NEMAR resource and its NIH award while remaining useful beyond a single grant period: open standards, public documentation, FAIR data practices, reproducible software, and reviewable changes are part of the infrastructure itself.
What this means in practice
Section titled “What this means in practice”- Open by default where appropriate. Published data, metadata, interfaces, documentation, and software should be inspectable and reusable under their stated licenses.
- Standards before convenience. BIDS-shaped source data and explicit schemas make the archive legible to people and tools that NEMAR did not write.
- Citable, not frozen. A DOI identifies a dataset and its released versions; corrections and improvements remain possible through a visible version history.
- Human review with computational help. Automation and AI can help validate and describe data, but publication authority and consequential corrections remain reviewable human decisions.
- Useful at different scales. A browser should support a first look, a CLI should support a repeatable workflow, and future compute services should make it practical to work near large collections.
- Friendly to research agents. Stable URLs, JSON metadata, manifests, BIDS paths, Markdown, schema.org records, and documentation should let software discover the same resource a person can use.
Why CLI-first and web-facing
Section titled “Why CLI-first and web-facing”NEMAR’s API and CLI provide the durable foundation: commands can be scripted, reviewed, rerun, and used on infrastructure without a graphical session. The website is a consumer-facing shell around those contracts. It lowers the entry cost for discovery and common tasks without creating a second catalog or a different definition of a dataset.
See the ecosystem overview, CLI versus web guide, and guide for agents and tools for the concrete interfaces.