OMEGA: The Open MEG Archive

• Published in: NeuroImage (Orlando, Fla.) Vol. 124; no. Pt B; pp. 1182 - 1187
• Main Authors: Niso, Guiomar, Rogers, Christine, Moreau, Jeremy T., Chen, Li-Yuan, Madjar, Cecile, Das, Samir, Bock, Elizabeth, Tadel, François, Evans, Alan C., Jolicoeur, Pierre, Baillet, Sylvain
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Elsevier Inc 01.01.2016; Elsevier Limited
• Subjects: Archives & records; Brain research; Databases, Factual; Datasets; Demographics; EEG; Electroencephalography; Electrophysiology; Ethics; Gender; Humans; Information Dissemination; Information sharing; Initiatives; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Magnetoencephalography; Medical imaging; MEG; MRI; Neuroimaging; Open-access; Quality control; Studies; Time series; Database; Electrophysiology; Open-access; MRI; EEG; MEG
• ISSN: 1053-8119; 1095-9572
• DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2015.04.028

In contrast with other imaging modalities, there is presently a scarcity of fully open resources in magnetoencephalography (MEG) available to the neuroimaging community. Here we present a collaborative effort led by the McConnell Brain Imaging Centre of the Montreal Neurological Institute, and the Université de Montréal to build and share a centralised repository to curate MEG data in raw and processed form for open dissemination. The Open MEG Archive (OMEGA, omega.bic.mni.mcgill.ca) is bound to become a continuously expanding repository of multimodal data with a primary focus on MEG, in addition to storing anatomical MRI volumes, demographic participant data and questionnaires, and other forms of electrophysiological data such as EEG. The OMEGA initiative offers both the technological framework for multi-site MEG data aggregation, and serves as one of the largest freely available resting-state and eventually task-related MEG datasets presently available. •We introduce the first open data repository dedicated to MEG.•OMEGA contains data in raw and processed forms, including source image volumes.•Current focus is on resting-state, but task-related data can also be contributed.•It will become a resource in electrophysiology including EEG and cell recordings.•OMEGA will continue to expand with contributions from the scientific community.