"We would like to provide high resolution images of brain slices for the research community to view. Would the [Stanford] Digital Repository be able to host our image data for this purpose?"

Have you ever had a similar question about how to make your research data available for other people to access? The Stanford Digital Repository is a great place to share research data of all kinds, including imagery.

Brady Weissbourd, a graduate student in Liqun Luo's lab in the biology department, was looking for a way to make a large set of valuable mouse brain images easier for other researchers to access. A former post-doctoral researcher in his lab (another "he told a friend…" example!) alerted him to the existence of the Stanford Digital Repository -- and it turned out to be exactly what he was looking for!

The research performed by Brady and his colleagues mapped the connectivity of serotonin and GABA neurons in the dorsal raphe nucleus of mice. They showed that these two types of neurons receive direct inputs from a wide range of specific regions of the brain.

Preparing the content for deposit involved considering what file format would be most accessible for others to use, how many and which of the images constituted a useful set for sharing, and whether to combine those files into a single archived file for downloading, or to leave them separate.

Approximately 130 of Brady's mouse brain images are now available from the Stanford Digital Repository. Check out the details of the research in Neuron!