Synapse is a collaborative research platform created by Sage Bionetworks. We aim to promote reproducible research and responsible data sharing throughout the biomedical community. Synapse is a tool that helps you and your team share, organize, and discuss your scientific research. Whether you are part of a small private team or global consortia, Synapse offers tools to help you make connections across datasets, code, and other insights.
Synapse is helping scientists in several ways:
Building community around data sharing: Synapse hosts many research communities and open 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 people come together to solve important computational problems or to compare analytical approaches.
Protecting sensitive data: Synapse is designed to keep sensitive data safe while still being shared responsibly. The platform offers built-in features to control who can access data and how that data can be used. Synapse is also backed by a governance team who routinely monitor data use and who set policies and procedures to govern data access.
Accessing data programmatically: 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 allows you to seamlessly integrate Synapse with your scientific computing and analytical workflows.
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 for an account to get access to public data sets.