Improving Data Quality in Neurotrauma Data Sharing: The Open Data Commons Minimal Data Standards and a Data Tool for Compliance

Abstract

The Open Data Commons (ODC) for Traumatic Brain Injury (ODC-TBI) and Spinal Cord Injury (ODC-SCI) are secure online platforms for members of the neurotrauma community to access curated, publicly available domain-specific data, and manage, share, and publish datasets with a citable DOI. Currently, preparing and uploading a dataset and its corresponding data dictionary involve multiple rounds of manual revisions to meet ODC guidelines. Here, we present the ODC Minimum Data Standards (MDS) and the ODC Data Quality App (ODCdqa), an open-source web-based tool that simplifies the revision and curation workflow. The ODCdqa allows users to automate initial data quality checks and provides immediate feedback on whether the dataset meets ODC data specifications or requires edits. All publicly available datasets on the ODC-SCI and ODC-TBI websites were passed into the ODCdqa for analysis. Exclusion criteria were: (1) did not have a data dictionary, and (2) the dataset and/or data dictionary had different headers. The aggregated results were then used to identify common areas of difficulty and inform the future directions of ODC tool development and platform. Out of the 124 publicly available ODC datasets uploaded between 2018 and September 2025, 119 were used (84 from ODC-SCI, 35 from ODC-TBI). Both ODC-SCI and ODC-TBI had a trend of reducing the number of failed checks as the platform matured over the years, and the MDS and ODCdqa were used regularly by curators and users. In summary, the ODCdqa is an automated tool that allows any user to perform initial checks to determine whether a dataset and its corresponding data dictionary are ready for upload to the ODC platform. As the ODC platform evolves, more checks and features will be added to the ODCdqa.