Synapse is a collaborative research platform that helps you and your team share, organize, and discuss your scientific research.
better, reproducible research
responsible sharing
building community
Whether you are part of a small private team or global consortia, Synapse helps you make connections across datasets, code, and other insights. It is a place where you can pool resources and expertise to build a virtual community around your research.
What can Synapse help you do? Synapse helps scientists in several ways:
Building community around data sharing - Synapse hosts many research communities and scientific resources. It is a central place where researchers can come together to share data and collaborate. Data can be annotated and queried in one place, even if it is physically stored in different locations.
Making research more reproducible - Most research projects are complex and change over time. Synapse helps you track who performed what parts of an analysis. It also tracks when data was added or changed within a project, and it helps you understand how a dataset or an analysis evolved. These tools help you to publish reproducible work that can be used more easily by others.
Benchmarking and challenges: Tackling a complex problem alone can be difficult. Synapse hosts crowdsourced competitions, including DREAM Challenges, where many groups come together to solve important computational problems or to compare analytical approaches.
Protecting sensitive data: Synapse is designed to keep sensitive data safe.
Synapse is free for the scientific community through generous support from various funding sources. Anyone can access Synapse on the web at synapse.org, and we recommend that you register an account to get access to most public data sets. If you are a programmer, you can also access Synapse through a REST API, Python client, R client, or command line client. Accessing Synapse programmatically through one of these clients allows you to seamlessly integrate Synapse with your analytical workflow.
Synapse hosts many research projects and resources. It also hosts crowdsourced competitions, including DREAM Challenges.
Anyone can access Synapse through a web browser. If you are a programmer, you can also access Synapse through a REST API, Python client, R client, or command line client. Accessing Synapse programmatically through one of these clients allows you to seamlessly integrate Synapse with your analytical workflow.
Synapse helps scientists solve a variety of problems:
Finding and using relevant data - It can be difficult to find and access data generated by others, even within the same organization.
Understanding analysis workflows - Most research projects are complex and evolve over time. Synapse helps you track who performed what parts of an analysis. It also tracks when data was added or changed within a project. These tools help you to do reproducible work that can be used more easily by others.
Supporting large-scale analysis - Analyzing large datasets requires access to significant computational resources and IT support. Synapse facilitates a computational model where code and users can move to the data, wherever it is stored.
Creating productive collaborations - Most scientists tend to start their research from scratch rather than elaborate on work in an unknown state. Synapse helps scientists track what work has already been done in a particular area and create and sustain active collaborations in which research results are published online as they are generated.
challenges/benchmarking
governance - data tiers
Sage Bionetworks provides Synapse to the scientific community for free through generous support from various funding sources.