BIDS is the Brain Imaging Data Structure: a standardized way to organize brain imaging data and their associated metadata. BIDS can help illustrate some of the advantages of adopting good data management principles, even for "selfish" reason.
The lack of consensus on how to organize data leads to misunderstandings and time wasted on rearranging data or rewriting scripts expecting certain structure. The obvious benefits of standardization are:
- It will be easy for another researcher (or yourself in the future) to work on your data. This is especially important if you are running your own lab and anticipate more than one person working on the same data over time. By standardizing your data structure, you will save time trying to understand and reuse data acquired by a graduate student or postdoc that has already left the lab.
- It is easier to write data preprocessing and analysis software packages that can understand a predefined data structure: an entire preprocessing workflow of a dataset you have never seen can be run with one line of code as long as the data complies with that standard.
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