Systems Biology in Neuroscience: the Paramount Importance of Data Sharing and Citation

Editorial Letter to the NeuroOmics Community

The emergence and maturation, in the last decade, of high powerful technologies in the fields of neurogenomics, neurometabolomics, and neuroproteomics has opened exciting novel possibilities of research [1,2,3,4]. These technologies allow exploring the molecular composition of brain and nervous system constituents in a wide and unbiased manner by generating large and complex sets of data that become open to further analysis and interpretation by the research community. In that sense, I strongly believe that every generated set of omics data should become a valuable and solid brick in the global wall of neuroscientific knowledge. These bricks should stand findable and steadily open to further systemic and contextualized interpretations. Thus, it is of paramount importance to store and share the data generated through multi-omics technologies in open and public repositories. Similarly, authors are encouraged to complement or base their original research on shared data available in public repositories when these data can successfully contribute to explore novel hypotheses of the research. Finally, the authors that publish Original Research articles in NeuroSci are highly encouraged to publish data descriptors of their omics generated data in specialized journals; this fact will make their shared data findable and citable increasing at the same time the readership interest of the published interpretations.