Collaborations between individual labs are commonplace across many disciplines, but large-scale consortia are perhaps better known in the physics community or in genomics. Yet, in recent years, large-scale initiatives have entered the neuroscience scene.

In large-scale collaborations, scientists with different expertise contribute to the project. Credit: Debbie Maizels/Springer Nature

The BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Consortium and now the BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network are prime examples of top-down approaches (Neuron 96, 542–557, 2017). Following the announcement of the BRAIN Initiative in 2013, a working group developed the strategic vision; this resulted in funding mechanisms for projects aimed at generating a comprehensive census of cell types in the brains of species ranging from fish and mouse to human. Groups involved in these efforts benchmarked existing approaches and developed new methods in support of this goal, then deployed these methods to generate transcriptomic, epigenomic, anatomical and functional data. Furthermore, they established infrastructure for disseminating and sharing the data, results and resources generated, such that both the community and the public can profit.

In contrast, the International Brain Laboratory (IBL) has emerged from the bottom up (Neuron 96, 1213–1218, 2017). A group of 21 labs with expertise in electrophysiology, calcium imaging, mouse behavior and data analysis teamed up to tackle a common question. They established a data sharing and storage infrastructure and agreed to focus on a visual decision-making task in mouse. To compare data across different labs and to increase reproducibility, the group had to standardize all aspects of this behavioral task before the different labs could embark on recording from different brain areas. The generated data are made available to the whole group for further analysis, and the IBL plans to release them 12 months after generation or upon publication.

Large-scale initiatives like these generate a wealth of data, resources and tools, and making these available to the community is bound to multiply their impact. We look forward to these efforts bearing fruit.