Become a Member

The BRAINCommons Membership Program is intended to provide an opportunity for external organizations, including non-profit, industry, government and academic organizations, to leverage the infrastructure investments made by Cohen Veterans Bioscience and the Open Commons Consortium and maximize cost-effectiveness for maintenance costs through shared financial support.

Members will:

• Become part of a public-private partnership that will enable and stimulate brain-related data sharing and analysis.
• Benefit from extensive due diligence and substantial investments from Cohen Veterans Bioscience, the Open Commons Consortium and University of Chicago.
• Participate in the design of novel features to support a community-centric approach to development of the research platform.
• Receive updates on BRAINCommons development activities through regular status reports and biannual Partner Advisory Committee face-to-face meetings.
• Join an established initiative without having to incur the transaction costs needed to create a new consortium.
• Become part of a growing community, with new data and analytics tools coming online continuously.
• Have the ability to conduct cross-brain disease analysis by seamlessly integrating data with other BRAINCommons datasets.
• Be recognized on the BRAINCommons website, electronic and printed materials, and select press communications (where appropriate).

For more information on becoming a member or for other Partnership or Sponsorship opportunities, please contact us.

Become a Data Contributor

The BRAINCommons and its utility will grow with the Community and its interest in sharing high-quality, well annotated datasets.  If you are interested in becoming a BRAINCommons data contributor, please contact us. Transfer of data to the BRAINCommons does not imply any change in ownership or governance of that data, and the data contributor may later request data removal.

The first step in contributing data is connecting with the Data Access Committee (DAC) by completing a Data Contributor Agreement and submitting a Data Inventory Form.  The Committee will confirm whether your data meet criteria (including type, completeness, annotation, regulatory, and sponsorship, at a minimum). 

Once authorized, you will be assigned a Data Steward to guide you through the data ingestion process, including working with a data curation expert should that be necessary. At this point, you will be provided with a timeline for preparation and upload of data and credentials to access the data submission portal.