FAQ

Synapse is a cloud-based data repository and sharing platform where researchers can share and describe content to co-analyze, learn from, and improve knowledge of health and disease. Synapse was developed to encourage research collaborations across institutional boundaries and is therefore provided as “Software As A Service” with a single instance used by all users. This makes it easy to discover and share public User Content, including Data, analyses, tools, methods, and other content. Synapse also supports private project spaces where the individual content contributor controls User Content sharing.
Synapse provides a standard interface to describe User Content, where it comes from, and how to use it. Synapse also provides mechanisms for adding User Content and its descriptions.
Synapse can facilitate sharing User Content stored in many locations, or cloud storage. This allows Synapse to store metadata about the Content, such as annotations, descriptive wiki pages, and provenance, but not the actual data. Currently, Synapse supports files stored in AWS S3 buckets and the Google Cloud Storage Platform. (see Custom Storage Locations).

Not directly. Synapse helps you manage User Content, including Data, analysis, tools, methods,  and results. However, using the programmatic interfaces built into Synapse makes it easy to set up analytical pipelines and ad hoc analyses that interact with Synapse. By default, Synapse uses Amazon’s cloud infrastructure (S3) for storage, making it simple to allocate large compute resources and collocate them next to User Content storage.

Synapse does support users performing analysis on data stored in S3 buckets in Synapse using the AWS Security Token Service (STS). (see Computing Directly on Data in Synapse In S3)

Anyone 18 years or older may create an account on Synapse. Sage offers different plans for Synapse. These plans have varying restrictions and limitations on user training requirements and allowable user content. We have highlighted a series of research communities currently using Synapse for collaborative work and some open resources hosted in Synapse.

Our Discussion Forum is a great place to reach out to the broader Synapse community to find others that may be interested in a collaboration. Depending on your plan level (Synapse Offerings), you may have access to our help desk. 

The Terms and Conditions of Use fully describes the governance terms and conditions of Synapse. In order to register on Synapse, you must review and agree to the terms of the Synapse Awareness and Ethics Pledge. For more information, see Synapse Governance.