Proceedings of the OHBM Brainhack 2021

The global pandemic presented new challenges and opportunities for organizing conferences, and OHBM 2021 was no exception. The OHBM Brainhack is an event that occurs just prior to the OHBM meeting, typically in-person, where scientists of all levels of expertise and interest gather to work and learn together for a few days in a collaborative hacking-style environment on projects of common interest (1). Building off the success of the OHBM 2020 Hackathon (2), the 2021 Open Science Special Interest Group came together online to organize a large coordinated Brainhack event that would take place over the course of 4 days. The OHBM 2021 Brainhack event was organized along two guiding principles, providing a highly inclusive collaborative environment for interaction between scientists across disciplines and levels of expertise to push forward important projects that need support, also known as the “Hack-Track” of the Brainhack. The second aim of the OHBM Brainhack is to empower scientists to improve the quality of their scientific endeavors by providing high-quality hands-on training on best practices in open-science approaches. This is best exemplified by the training events provided by the “Train-Track” at the OHBM 2021 Brainhack. Here, we briefly explain both of these elements of the OHBM 2021 Brainhack, before continuing on to the Brainhack proceedings.