NIDM-Results: Standardized reporting of mass univariate neuroimaging results in SPM, FSL and AFNI

Abstract : Results of a neuroimaging study are usually shared through the publication of a scientific paper describing the experiment and analysis outcome. While hundreds of gigabytes of data are usually generated as part of an fMRI experiment, in the literature the authors typically report their results as a list of significant local maxima, i.e. locations in the brain defined in a standard space (e.g. MNI) that pass rigorous statistical testing. This practice is unsatisfactory in terms of data re-use as it does not allow for the automatic extraction of acquisition or processing information and it provides only sparse information about the location of the brain activity. While databases have been built to provide manually curated (such as BrainMap ​ [1]​) or automatically-extracted (e.g. NeuroSynth ​ [2]​) meta-data associated with published papers, ideally, these meta-data should be made available by the authors themselves at the time of the publication.