Open Neuroscience: new approaches for new tools

Open-source tools are gaining an increasing foothold in neuroscience. The rising complexity of experiments in systems neuroscience has led to a need for multiple parts of a setup to work together seamlessly, which means that open-source tools that expose more interfaces and can be understood and modified more easily have an advantage and allow scientists to conduct better experiments with less effort than closed tools. Open Ephys is a nonprofit with team members distributed all around the world. Our mission is to advance our understanding of the brain by promoting community ownership of the tools we use to study it. We are making and distributing cutting edge tools that exploit modern technology to bring down the price and complexity of neuroscience experiments. A large component of this is to take tools that were developed in academic labs and helping with documentation, community support, and distribution. More recently, we have been working on establishing standards that make it possible to combine many existing experimental methods, such as miniaturized microscopes, electrode drive implants, or silicon probes seamlessly in one system. In the longer term, our development of new tools, interfaces and our standardization efforts have the goal of making it possible for scientists to easily run complex experiments that span from complex behaviors and tasks, multiple recording modalities, to easy access to data processing pipelines.