The tree-like morphology of neurons and glia is a key cellular determinant of circuit connectivity and metabolic function in the nervous system of essentially all animals. To elucidate the contribution of specific cell types to both physiological and pathological brain states, it is important to access detailed neuroanatomy data for quantitative analysis and computational modeling. NeuroMorpho.Org is the largest online collection of freely available digital neural reconstructions and related metadata and is continuously updated with new uploads. Earlier in the project, we released multiple datasets together yearly, but this process caused an average delay of several months in making the data public. Moreover, in the past 5 years, >80% of invited authors agreed to share their data with the community via NeuroMorpho.Org, up from <20% in the first 5 years of the project. In the same period, the average number of reconstructions per publication increased 600%, creating the need for automatic processing to release more reconstructions in less time. The progressive automation of our pipeline enabled the transition to agile releases of individual datasets as soon as they are ready. The overall time from data identification to public sharing decreased by 63.7%; 78% of the datasets are now released in less than 3 months with an average workflow duration below 40 days. Furthermore, the mean processing time per reconstruction dropped from 3 h to 2 min. With these continuous improvements, NeuroMorpho.Org strives to forge a positive culture of open data. Most importantly, the new, original research enabled through reuse of datasets across the world has a multiplicative effect on science discovery, benefiting both authors and users.

The tree-like morphology of neurons and glia is a key cellular determinant of circuit connectivity and metabolic function in the nervous system of essentially all animals. To elucidate the contribution of specific cell types to both physiological and pathological brain states, it is important to access detailed neuroanatomy data for quantitative analysis and computational modeling. NeuroMorpho.Org is the largest online collection of freely available digital neural reconstructions and related metadata and is continuously updated with new uploads. Earlier in the project, we released multiple datasets together yearly, but this process caused an average delay of several months in making the data public. Moreover, in the past 5 years, >80% of invited authors agreed to share their data with the community via NeuroMorpho.Org, up from <20% in the first 5 years of the project. In the same period, the average number of reconstructions per publication increased 600%, creating the need for automatic processing to release more reconstructions in less time. The progressive automation of our pipeline enabled the transition to agile releases of individual datasets as soon as they are ready. The overall time from data identification to public sharing decreased by 63.7%; 78% of the datasets are now released in less than 3 months with an average workflow duration below 40 days. Furthermore, the mean processing time per reconstruction dropped from 3 hours to 2 minutes. With these continuous improvements, NeuroMorpho.Org strives to forge a positive culture of open data. Most importantly, the new, original research enabled through reuse of datasets across the world has a multiplicative effect on science discovery, benefiting both authors and users.

Advancements in neuroscience research have led to steadily accelerating data production and sharing. The online community repository of neural reconstructions NeuroMorpho.Org grew from fewer than 1000 digitally traced neurons in 2006 to more than 140,000 cells today, including glia that now constitute 10.1% of the content. Every reconstruction consists of a detailed 3D representation of branch geometry and connectivity in a standardized format, from which a collection of morphometric features is extracted and stored. Moreover, each entry in the database is accompanied by rich metadata annotation describing the animal subject, anatomy, and experimental details. The rapid expansion of this resource in the past decade was accompanied by a parallel rise in the complexity of the available information, creating both opportunities and challenges for knowledge mining. Here, we introduce a new summary reporting functionality, allowing NeuroMorpho.Org users to efficiently download digests of metadata and morphometrics from multiple groups of similar cells for further analysis. We demonstrate the capabilities of the tool for both glia and neurons and present an illustrative statistical analysis of the resulting data.