3D neuroimaging data in online journal articles

About the 3D neuroimaging viewer

Authors of relevant articles are invited to enrich their online articles by providing neuroimaging data in NIfTI format. This will be visualized for the readers using the interactive viewer embedded within the article, and will enable them to: browse through available neuroimaging datasets; zoom, rotate and pan the 3D brain reconstruction; cut through the volume; change opacity and color mapping; switch between 3D and 2D projected views; and download the data. It will also be possible to open the viewer in a detached full-screen mode.

Representation of how the 3D neuroimaging viewer will appear on ScienceDirect.

The viewer has been developed in collaboration with Kitware SAS and supports all major browsers and mobile devices.

Benefits for authors and readers

The 3D neuroimaging viewer enables authors to enrich and extend their articles by adding a possibility to optimally express the results of research through improved visualization. This provides a way to highlight their findings in a visual and easily accessible manner, helping readers to quickly understand the relevance of a research paper, to visualize research data for deeper insights, and to access the underlying data. The enriched article may contribute to a better understanding of experiments described in the article and help encourage re-use of the neuroimaging data.

Innovating & Enriching Content

For almost 350 years, academic articles have been published in a similar layout – a format which starts with an abstract and ends with a conclusion and a list of references. Articles were presented in this way with the reader of the printed version in mind. However most researchers now access articles online, which means that readership styles and how information is gathered have changed.

We are adapting to these changes because we want to help authors to improve how their research is presented online and readers to gain deeper insights faster. Offering the 3D neuroimaging viewer functionality in our journals is just one of the ways we are doing this.

The 3D neuroimaging viewer functionality enables authors to enrich and extend their articles by providing a possibility to interactively explore 3D data and hence make these data better accessible. This helps readers to quickly understand the relevance of a research paper and to visualize research data for deeper insights.

Supported data formats

The Elsevier’s 3D neuroimaging viewer supports NIfTI data format. NIfTI format (Neuroimaging Informatics Technology Initiative), a standard data format used in neuroimaging to capture volumetric (f)MRI data.

The viewer supports single (.nii) and dual (.hdr and .img) NIfTI file formats.

More information about this data format can be found here.

Submission & publication

Please submit your neuroimaging data in NIfTI format with the manuscript. Multiple datasets can be submitted with a single article. We support single (.nii) and dual (.hdr and .img) NIfTI file formats. Each dataset will have to be zipped and uploaded to online submission system via the "3D neuroimaging data" submission category. Recommended size of a single uncompressed dataset is ≤100 MB. Please provide a short informative description for each dataset by filling in the “Description” field when uploading a dataset.

Note: all datasets will be available for download from the online article on ScienceDirect. If you have concerns about your data being downloadable, please provide a video instead.