A widely used neuroscience software infrastructure is set to lose its main source of funding in March 2026, which could make it harder for neurophysiology researchers to standardize their data and build on the work of others.
Projects that use this open-source data standard, which is called Neurodata Without Borders, include multiple data repositories from the BRAIN Initiative, a key effort from the U.S. National Institutes of Health. The BRAIN Initiative furnished the primary grant that supports Neurodata Without Borders until the grant end date on 28 February. Team members say they have not secured new funds to replace the lapsed grant, which has provided more than $1 million annually since 2021.
“Scientists built their analysis on [Neurodata Without Borders]. They built their entire data ecosystems on this,” says Oliver Rübel, a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and one of two principal investigators on the grant. “And when that goes away? Well, now you’re putting the entire ecosystem at risk.”
Without this funding, the team that maintains the infrastructure will lack the support needed to ensure the software keeps working and is up to date, says Ben Dichter, the grant’s other principal investigator and the founder of CatalystNeuro, which develops software tools for Neurodata Without Borders.
“This funding is about helping us keep up with the needs of the community,” says Dichter, noting that the grant made it possible to train researchers to use the software and supported updates to accommodate new forms of data collection—such as fiber photometry and semi-automated pose estimation—that have gained traction in the field since the project began. Rübel compares the project’s likely future to a road that no longer receives regular maintenance. “The roads are going to keep working for a while, but we’re not filling potholes anymore,” he says. “There’s a new city being built, but I’m not building a road to it.”
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consortium of research organizations founded Neurodata Without Borders in 2014 to help investigators align experimental outputs with the FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship, which hold that data should be findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable.“The software provides a common language to describe the diversity of experimental subjects, designs [and] behaviors,” says Kristofer Bouchard, a Neurodata Without Borders executive committee member who leads the Computational Biosciences Group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and is adjunct assistant professor of neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley.
This standardization maximizes the scientific knowledge to be gained from a given experiment, as different research teams can explore new questions using the same dataset, Dichter says.
At the time the project was launched, there was a great need to standardize neurophysiology data but insufficient resources to do so, recalls Maryann Martone, a principal investigator in the FAIR Data Informatics Lab at the University of California, San Diego, where she is professor emerita. “A lot of homegrown rigs, homegrown pipelines.”
Martone says she was involved in the early planning meetings for Neurodata Without Borders as a member of the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility, which helps establish data standards. At the prototype stage, most funding for Neurodata Without Borders came from the Kavli Foundation, Bouchard says. The BRAIN Initiative began supporting the project just months before the product was released to the broader research community in early 2019.
The BRAIN Initiative is itself supported in part by an annual base allocation from 10 NIH research centers. Congress reduced this base allocation by more than half in the 2023 fiscal year, making less funding available for the upkeep of tools such as Neurodata Without Borders. “Traditional science funding is not designed for maintaining infrastructure,” Rübel says. Subsequent cuts to BRAIN Initiative funding from the 21st Century Cures Act left the team less likely to receive other types of grants from the program, he adds.
“Anybody who’s in informatics faces these funding issues,” Martone says. “We’re solving the technical problems, solving governance problems, we’re solving development problems, but nobody has solved the sustainability problem.”
The most sustainable infrastructure projects diversify their funding sources, she notes. The BRAIN Initiative is not the sole backer of Neurodata Without Borders, and some activities, such as the development of a new application programming interface, can proceed with other smaller grants. In the meantime, the team says they are searching for new support sources to continue maintaining and sharing their product with scientists.
“A lot of the focus in the early stages of NWB has just been getting datasets into that format, but the uptake in the use of it [has] not quite been realized yet,” says Ashley Juavinett, associate teaching professor of neurobiology at the University of California, San Diego, who recently published an online textbook about working with Neurodata Without Borders datasets. The textbook was funded by a grant from the Kavli Foundation intended to support researchers converting their data to the Neurodata Without Borders format. Juavinett said she offered the consortium feedback about potential barriers to adopting the data standard.
Getting researchers to embrace new forms of data stewardship requires trust, Rübel notes, and he worries that the community that uses and contributes to Neurodata Without Borders could dissolve if his team can’t respond to user needs. “We need to start investing in our research infrastructure to make sure this stuff is reliable and we can have a continued trust in that ecosystem,” he says.
