Funding

The DRC is committed to ensuring a long-term future for SPARC as a hub of data, knowledge, and resources. Over the years, we have taken significant steps towards sustainability, expanding our funding base and exploring commercial and educational opportunities.

• SPARC’s focus has broadened to serve the wider community interested in bridging the body and the brain.
• We now also support additional Consortia,. If you need a data coordinating center, advanced modeling, a computational platform, or other technologies and services offered by SPARC (learn more about what we offer), please reach out to us at [email protected].
• Investigators like you play a vital role in supporting our platform. SPARC fills a critical niche within the neuroscience repository ecosystem, specializing in data and tools related to the peripheral nervous system (PNS), organ physiology, and PNS–central nervous system (CNS) interactions. We encourage our community members to include SPARC in your Data Management and Sharing Plans and allocate funds to support SPARC’s continuation. Visit Data Sharing and Management Costs for NIH Grant Proposals for guidance and see this link for more information about pricing for publishing datasets on the SPARC Portal.
• The SPARC ecosystem consists of integrated platforms and tools developed by an interdisciplinary, international team of data experts, with scale and sustainability in mind. Below, we describe some of the measures in place to ensure SPARC remains a trusted repository for your scientific data into the future.

Guaranteed Data Availability

We guarantee that all data submitted to the SPARC repository will remain available for at least 10 years after publication. To support continuous operation beyond the original SPARC program funding, we are diversifying funding sources and securing additional mechanisms to support different aspects of the Portal.

The SPARC Portal provides access to datasets free of charge through the NIH (STRIDES Initiative | Data Science at NIH). We are receent recipients of the the AWS Open Data Sponsorship program, which will cover data storage and transfer costs for a minimum of two years. In addition, the University of Pennsylvania guarantees availability of SPARC data for 10 years post publication in the case other efforts are no longer funded. In this scenario, data will continue to be made available through the University of Pennsylvania, and DOIs will be updated to continue to point to the datasets.

Sustainable platform technologies

SPARC is comprised of a number of platform technologies such as SciCrunch, Pennsieve, o2S2PARC, and the MAP-Core tools. Each platform is developed to support multiple projects and is funded through various sources. This diversification helps ensure the continuous operation of the SPARC Portal and its related services.

Open source projects

Key components of the infrastructure are developed as open source projects, with code publicly available even if program funding ends. This enables the broader research community to maintain and operate these resources if necessary.

Main open-source components include:

• SPARC Portal: https://github.com/nih-sparc
• o2S2PARC:
  • https://github.com/ITISFoundation/osparc-simcore
  • https://api.osparc.io/dev/doc
• Pennsieve:
  • https://github.com/Pennsieve
  • https://docs.pennsieve.io/reference
• MAP tools
  • Flatmaps / knowledge management are primarily using the repositories under the https://github.com/AnatomicMaps organization.
  • Scaffold mapping tools, described in this tutorial for getting started: https://github.com/ABI-Tutorials/ABI-MappingTools
  • Portal viewers / components, while used in various places on the portal, are all covered by the Map Integrated Vuer: https://github.com/ABI-Software/mapintegratedvuer
  • Simulation tools (used in o2S2PARC and via the portal) are located in the https://github.com/opencor organization.
• K Core:
  • SCKAN SPARC Knowledge Graph: https://zenodo.org/records/7476115
  • SciGraph: https://github.com/SciGraph/SciGraph
  • SPARC Ontologies: https://github.com/SciCrunch/NIF-Ontology
  • SDS and SCKAN Curation Tools: https://github.com/SciCrunch/sparc-curation
  • SDS viewer: https://github.com/MetaCell/sds-viewer
• Additional Contributors
  • FAIR Data Innovations Hub, a division of the California Medical Innovations Institute (CalMI2)
    • SODA SDS Tool: https://github.com/fairdataihub/SODA-for-SPARC