The UK Digital Curation Center is conducting a series of detailed discipline specific case studies of data curation and data sharing practices and issues under the rubric of a program called SCARP (see http://www.dcc.ac.uk/scarp for an overview of the project; I note that there is no obvious expansion of the SCARP acronym). The first such study, dealing with Brain Imaging, is now available. Here are the details:

Our first case study is titled Curating Brain Images in a Psychiatric Research Group [PDF, 1.69MB] and involved the Neuroimaging Group in University of Edinburgh's Division of Psychiatry. A 5-page Summary and Recommendations [PDF, 170KB] from the study is available. The study combined an assessment of risks to the long-term value of the research group's datasets with field work to understand current data practices in their context. An Annex titled Neuroimaging Data Landscapes [PDF, 1.23MB] provides background on the development of imaging, the nature of the data collected for neuroimaging studies in psychiatry, data repository and curation resources available, and legal and ethical constraints on data exchange.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI