Two years ago I decided to join a new collaboration in neuroscience called the International Brain Laboratory (IBL). It was a gamble. Systems neuroscience doesn’t really do collaborations of this magnitude. Sure, there are top-down initiatives aimed at fostering collaboration between already existing labs. The idea of the IBL is that it is a lab, albeit physically distributed over several locations. The aim of this virtual laboratory is to standardize and reproduce a behavioral paradigm in all its experimental locations. Thereby tackling several problems that haunt systems neuroscience: reproducibility, statistical power, and a lack of data sharing. Everything the IBL produces is open-source: hardware (as far as possible), software, data, publications, protocols, etc. The big collaboration-wide publications that the IBL publishes are in the style of particle physics: a large number of authors who are all listed in alphabetical order. Contrary to particle physics, neuroscience is not used to these kind of publications. Traditionally in neuroscience, the researchers who has done the largest part of the work is listed as first author and the head of the lab is listed last. That brings me to why joining the IBL was a gamble. Unless there is a shift in how publications are valued on the job market, I will have a hard time convincing any hiring committee that I provided a substantial contribution to the paper where I’m listed as 22th author. I hope that CERN-style papers like this one will become more accepted and valued within the neuroscience community.
I believe that the way we traditionally do neuroscience is not viable. Both the theoretical and the experimental aspects of neuroscience have become too complex for individual labs to tackle. Researchers are expected to be polymaths. They should be skilled in physiology, programming, hardware, behavior, theoretical models, etc. All of these different topics are becoming increasingly complicated and specialized. In a traditional neuroscience publication the first author usually build the recording setup, trained subjects to perform a certain task, gathered the data, processed and analyzed the data, and wrote the paper. This was OK twenty years ago when most recordings were done with single channel electrodes and the behaviors under scrutiny relatively simple. Now, after an explosion of technological advancement everything from gathering to analyzing the data has become exponentially complex. I’m not saying that the way the IBL is set up is the only, or even the best, way forward. What is clear, however, is that the current system is unsustainable. The times, they are a-changin’.
Guido Meijer 