FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE [updated July 14, 2025]
SPARC DRC and Autonomic Neuroscience: Basic and Clinical Launch Partnership to Advance Open Science in Autonomic Research
July 1, 2025 — The SPARC Data and Resource Center (DRC) is proud to announce a new collaboration with Autonomic Neuroscience: Basic and Clinical (AN:BC), the official journal of the International Society for Autonomic Neuroscience. This partnership marks a significant step forward in promoting transparency, data sharing, and reproducibility in autonomic nervous system research. As part of this collaboration, AN:BC has endorsed the SPARC Portal as its preferred data repository, encouraging authors to deposit data in alignment with FAIR data principles—Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. Authors submitting to AN:BC are now invited to share their datasets via the SPARC Portal, enhancing scientific integrity and enabling new opportunities for discovery and collaboration. (Read the editorial here)
“This partnership represents a vital step forward in aligning our journal with the evolving standards of open science,” said Dr. Roy Freeman, Editor-in-Chief of AN:BC. “By integrating data deposition into our publishing process, we’re advancing our mission to make research more transparent and impactful.”
Initiated with funding by the NIH Common Fund’s Stimulating Peripheral Activity to Relieve Conditions (SPARC) program, the SPARC Portal currently hosts over 350 curated datasets, with a focus on the human vagus nerve, neuromodulation therapies, and cross-species anatomical mapping and physiology. All datasets are assigned DOIs and are structured to support high-impact computational modeling, clinical research, and biomedical device innovation.
NIH SPARC Program Director, Dr. Felicia Qashu commented, “The partnership between SPARC and Autonomic Neuroscience: Basic and Clinical reflects the kind of innovation in collaboration and infrastructure support that can truly enable shared goals. By ensuring that research outputs—including underlying data—are openly shared, discoverable, and reusable, this collaboration strengthens the return on research investment and supports a more transparent, efficient, and impactful research ecosystem.”
Key benefits of the collaboration include:
Increased Visibility: Datasets published to the SPARC Portal include direct links to the corresponding AN:BC article, ensuring seamless integration between data and publication.
Sustainable Open Access: Thanks to support from the AWS Open Data Sponsorship Program, SPARC offers free, long-term access to curated datasets following publication.
Enhanced Scientific Value: Standardized, multi-modal data formatting maximizes interoperability and reuse across disciplines.
This collaboration empowers AN:BC authors to contribute to the largest centralized source of autonomic data and supports the broader research community with rigorously curated, open-access resources. Now listed as an open neuroscience repository by the National Library of Medicine, International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF), Re3data, and FAIRSharing, the SPARC Portal has grown to encompass research domains that bridge the body and the brain, including data generated as part of the NIH HEAL initiative.
“We are delighted with this partnership for many reasons.” says DRC Principal Investigator, Dr. Peter Hunter, FRS, FRSNZ, “it will encourage authors to upload the data, models, or computational analysis pipelines associated with their AN:BC paper, which in turn should lead to greater use of SPARC connectivity maps and predictive models for the interpretation of complex data.” Dr. David Nickerson, DRC Principal Investigator, adds “The experienced and knowledgeable SPARC curation team ensures AN:BC authors will be well supported in their data, model, and analysis sharing journey”.
For more information, visit https://sparc.science or contact info@sparc.science
About the SPARC Data and Resource Center (SPARC DRC)
Formed in 2015, the SPARC DRC is a dedicated international consortium working together to advance scientific understanding and improve clinical outcomes by providing a leading platform for integrating data, knowledge, computational modeling, and mapping of the peripheral nervous system, its CNS interactions, and related physiological processes. Initiated with funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health Common Fund’s SPARC program (award numbers: OT2OD030541, OT3OD025348, OT3OD025347, and OT3OD025349), the SPARC Portal is now an open repository.
About Autonomic Neuroscience: Basic and Clinical (AN:BC)
An international journal with broad coverage of all aspects of the autonomic nervous system in man and animals, Autonomic Neuroscience: Basic and Clinical is part of the Elsevier family of scholarly journals. The main areas of interest include the innervation of blood vessels and viscera, autonomic ganglia, efferent and afferent autonomic pathways, and autonomic nuclei and pathways in the central nervous system.
