The path to discovery is littered with lab tape, solder, and snippets of code.

It’s impossible to anticipate everything that’s needed to make the next great experiment work, so scientists become tinkerers out of necessity—constantly tweaking, upgrading, and remixing the tools we use for data acquisition and analysis. These modifications, no matter how small, are valuable contributions to our collective knowledge of the most effective ways to study the brain, which are just as essential to progress as our knowledge of the brain itself.

Well-designed open-source platforms can harness this process of decentralized innovation, allowing the community to collaboratively improve our tools the same way we work together to advance our understanding of neuroscience. And when anyone has the ability to buy, build, or peer inside the components of our communal toolkit, it makes science more equitable overall.

We showcase open-source tools that deserve wider recognition. We focus on tools that foster collaboration, reduce the need for redundant development efforts, and offer similar (or better) performance than their closed-source counterparts at a fraction of the cost. 

We distribute and support open-source hardware throughout the community. Just because something is open source doesn’t mean it’s easily accessible. We take the hassle out of acquiring the latest designs by making it simple to buy fully assembled devices or ready-to-build kits.

We advocate for open standards that help move the field forward. Scientists currently waste countless hours laboring within parallel, mutually incompatible ecosystems when they could be working together. Adopting a range of well documented, institutionally supported, open interfaces will give us more time to focus on what we really care about: doing great science.

About our organizations

Open Ephys is an employee-owned cooperative based in Altanta, Georgia, with team members distributed all around the world. Our mission is to advance our understanding of the brain by promoting community ownership of the tools we use to study it. Since Open Ephys was founded in 2014, we’ve made it possible to build an entire extracellular electrophysiology rig from off-the-shelf open-source components. We are just getting started on our journey.

Open Ephys Production Site (OEPS) is a company based in Lisbon, Portugal that serves as a full-service shop for open-source tool dissemination. OEPS coordinates the assembly, testing, shipping, and repairs for every device sold through the Open Ephys Store, giving scientists more time to focus on their research. Having grown out of the Champalimaud Foundation, OEPS also provides scientific support and training by neuroscientists using open-source tools.

Our vision

We are working toward a future where neuroscience labs run on open standards. This doesn’t mean that every part of your rig needs to be open source, just that common interfaces let you choose the right tool for every job. Open standards foster healthier competition and enhance creativity by allowing the best ideas to propagate without the need to reinvent any wheels.

We envision a world where we adequately value people’s time. This requires explicitly paying for training and consulting services that alleviate the burden from scientists who are currently expected to “do it all.” A shared ecosystem based on open standards makes this much more feasible, as training materials can be developed and refined by the entire community.

We want to facilitate low-friction access to cutting-edge technologies. Attempting to replicate a new technique based on a published methods section should be a thing of the past. We want to make it commonplace to buy the latest devices and pip install the latest algorithms before the preprint even drops. And the tools should arrive in a readily hackable package that anyone is free to improve, while also receiving credit for their contributions.