CIBIT-UC project participates in pilot phase of institutional repository of research data

Allowing other research groups to have access to valuable data in the future, contributing to its reuse, is one of the goals of the Brainplayback project, coordinated by the Centre for Biomedical Imaging and Translational Research (CIBIT) at the University of Coimbra. Started in January 2022, Brainplayback is getting completed in the coming month of June and studies the neuronal mechanisms that underlie the emotions we feel when we listen to music. This year, the project was selected to participate in the pilot phase of implementing the Polen Research Data repository, managed by the FCT's National Scientific Computing Unit.

Widening access to research data and allowing its reuse is an essential component of the open science movement. In this sense, the adoption of best practices related to the new paradigm has been an ongoing effort of CIBIT, which now hosts the pilot phase of the Polen project, representing a new axis of collaboration and cooperation between Research and Development Units (RDUs), institutions and the national network, responding to a specific need to have an institutional research data repository service, generic enough to allow different teams to deposit and share research data.

"Our approach has been to use data repositories in the areas where our research takes place, but the possibility of using a certified repository, developed in coordination with the RDUs, was a missing element in the ecosystem of open science in Portugal," says Bruno Direito, CIBIT researcher and principal investigator of the Brainplayback project. For Bruno and the entire project team, participating in the pilot phase of the repository will allow UC to be involved from the beginning in the definition of the platform and its practices and procedures. "We believe we can contribute with our experience and learn a lot from the experience of the colleagues who will be part of the pilot project, both in the development of the platform and with other users," he adds.

Over the next few months, the CIBIT researchers linked to the Brainplayback project will receive different tasks related to the repository: a first period will be focused on training on the Dataverse ecosystem (technology associated with the development of the platform); then, the platform testing phase and data deposit will begin, a period in which the teams will be able to report difficulties and identify new requirements. “After a system optimisation phase, there will be a second stage of testing and final data set deposit. The Brainplayback project team will work on the tasks associated with this collaboration, as will the IT support team supporting CIBIT," explains the CIBIT researcher.

In order to carry out the tasks of testing the Polen platform, the research centre and particularly the Brainplayback project were allocated a sum of 5000 euros, which will allow funding the costs associated with data curation, training, IT equipment (storage and maintenance), human resources involved, etc.

Collect, analyse and reuse data on music and emotions

The CIBIT project chosen to test the Polen repository has as its majority source of data the technique of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging - fMRI. Participants in the study listen to brief musical snippets during the scan, allowing researchers to gain information about how the brain processes the heard snippets. "We then ask participants to rate the music they hear on different dimensions such as valence (which can be positive or negative) and activation (which can range from calm to arousal). This set of data will allow us to extract information about the way the brain interprets music", explains Bruno Direito. Studying the processes that relate music and emotion is decisive, he reminds us, to understand the social role of music and its potential therapeutic applications.

Besides CIBIT, six other Portuguese institutions will test the Polen platform in its implementation phase. Learn more by accessing the FCT website.