Inconsistent structure and naming of experimental neuroscience projects remains a major obstacle to data sharing, collaboration and reproducible analysis. Standardised file formats provide a potential solution, but adoption of these tools can require significant changes to existing workflows.

The Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) is a standardised directory structure specification developed for human imaging research. It’s low bar for entry has helped the field organise and share data, as well as catalysing the development of community software tools. Despite these successes, there is not yet a BIDS-like specification for data-intensive multi-modal neuroscience projects acquired in animal models.

Inspired by the needs of the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre (SWC) we have developed such a specification based on BIDS (and its existing extension proposals). This simple directory structure and file-naming standard has a low bar for adoption, with an emphasis on ease-of-use for researchers. Additionally we provide an automated tool for project file organisation, including directory naming and creation, and data transfer between computer systems.

We hope this will be useful for researchers in other institutions, and we will work towards developing an ecosystem of tools based around these specifications to further aid data analysis, collaboration and reproducibility.