BIDS Impact
The Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) is an open global community driving the standardization of neuroscience data across a broad and growing range of modalities and health research disciplines. First released in June 2016, it is supported by a worldwide research network and endorsed by organizations like the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF).
BIDS encompasses:
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Over 40 domain-specific and modality-specific technical specifications across scientific and technical domains.
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100+ sample data models for BIDS specifications in the bids-examples. Read more about the BIDS specification.
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2000 open datasets across repositories including OpenNeuro. Read more about BIDS Datasets.
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Open software conversion and analytics tools, and global infrastructure for collaborating on emerging standards in neuroscience Poldrack, et al, 2024.
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~ 30,000 annual website visits from a very large community of neuroscience researchers actively consulting the BIDS specifications (April 2023-24).
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Over 300 BIDS contributors currently supporting and maintaining BIDS community resources and tools.
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Open working processes through online collaborative tools including GitHub, GitHub Pages, ReadTheDocs, Google Docs, and OSF.
The BIDS core steering and maintainers groups work with the community to optimize open adherence to FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable, Wilkinson, et al, 2016) and to actively lower barriers to adoption.
BIDS History
Since its origin, the BIDS standard has revolutionized the way in which neuroimaging research is done. The origin of the BIDS standard is commonly traced back to 2014, when a social media post ignited a deeper discussion about a new way of sharing data, that would ultimately lead to a set of standards that would improve scientific collaboration efforts.
Following this initial discussion (and on the shoulders of many many volunteer hours by maintainers and the community at large) the BIDS standard saw significant adoption in the neuroimaging research landscape and continues to expand every day. A more complete history and discussion about the future of the BIDS landscape can be found in this recent publication.
The BIDS standard continues to be adopted by a larger share of the community each year. We have seen a large and growing number of visitors to the BIDS website. A large number of BIDS users also continue to explore the BIDS Specification and contribute to the community every month.
We also document centers, institutes, and databases around the world that have implemented BIDS as their organizational structure. While the list continues to grow, an initial list of centers and the associated BIDS initiatives or database can be found here.
Website and Specification traffic dashboards
In order to measure the volume of traffic to our website and the ReadTheDocs rendering of the specification, we utilize Google Analytics.
For visualizing our metrics, we have put together 2 dashboards:
The default time period is set to the past 6 months. This can be changed by adjusting the time period in the upper left corner. Please feel free to use any of these figures in your grant! If there are additional statistics not currently conveyed, please reach out to or the BIDS maintainers via a GitHub issue, or by email (bids.maintenance@gmail.com).
BIDS usage
Here is a non-exhaustive list of imaging centers, institutes, databases around the world that have implemented BIDS as their organizational structure.
| type | place |
|---|---|
| Center | Dartmouth Brain Imaging Center |
| Center | Max Planck Institute for Human Development |
| Center | NYU Center for Brain Imaging |
| Database | ABCD |
| Database | Developing Human Connectome Project |
| Database | FCP-INDI |
| Database | OpenNeuro |
| Database | OpenNeuroPET |
| Database | Schizconnect |
| Database | UMC Utrecht intracranial EEG data |
| Initiative | Ontario Neurodegenerative Disease Research Initiative |
We ran a survey in June 2019 to evaluate the uptake of BIDS in the community. We received feedback from 116 global researchers.
We also measured the general BIDS impact across multiple domains (datasets, citations...). Read more on the Impact Dashboards page.
Neurostars
We also track the interest and usage of the BIDS standard via discussions on Neurostars to help us estimate trends in usage. Below is a snapshot as of ??? (date).
| tag | nb topics | nb posts | topics with no reply | topics with answer |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| bids | 716 | 3404 | 114 | 211 |
| bids-validator | 80 | 488 | 1 | 28 |
| pybids | 29 | 175 | 3 | 12 |
| dcm2bids | 92 | 529 | 4 | 53 |
| heudiconv | 102 | 454 | 17 | 23 |
| mriqc | 141 | 604 | 32 | 37 |
| fmriprep | 1286 | 7727 | 145 | 445 |
| qsiprep | 170 | 1063 | 12 | 76 |
| aslprep | 21 | 74 | 5 | 8 |
| nilearn | 585 | 2454 | 90 | 182 |
| fitlins | 19 | 129 | 2 | 5 |
| openneuro | 95 | 479 | 15 | 28 |
Mailing list volume
As of July 1, 2020, we have 183 people signed up for our BIDS email list and 412 members on our google group.
How the BIDS team can help you
If you are in the process of putting together a grant, please email/message the pillar lead that is most closely associated with your proposed grant or the BIDS maintainers email (bids.maintenance@gmail.com) so we may help support this. Our organization is structured into 3 pillars: standard, tools, and collaboration.
Our range of support covers activities such as: meeting with the Steering and Maintainers Groups to assisting with connecting you with other BIDS grant writers or related initiatives to receiving a letter of support from the Steering Group.
Regarding requesting a letter of support - please submit a drafted letter of support to the collaboration lead or the BIDS maintainers email (bids.maintenance@gmail.com) so we may review internally.
Please include how you plan on giving back to the BIDS community. The primary mechanism is to support a member of your team to become a BIDS Maintainer. Letters of support are approved by the Steering Group. This process may take 2-4 weeks to complete.
We kindly ask you to please share your grant online - successful or not. This will signal to the rest of the community what avenues we have pursued and what our fellow colleagues are planning on doing next. These can be grants that directly extend our support into a new domain, grants that help BIDS (for example OpenNeuro), or unsuccessful grant applications.
For example, please find our NIH-R24 Brain Initiative BIDS-Derivatives grant.
A listing of the previous grants can be found here
Citing BIDS in your project
You can find information on citing BIDS standards for specific modalities and citing BIDS in general in the specification