(Last Updated on July 5th, 2021)
(Last Updated on January 20, 2021)
This Privacy Policy governs the collection, use, and disclosure of information generated during your visit to the Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform (CONP) Portal. The Portal is hosted by the McGill Centre for Integrative Neuroscience (MCIN), a unit within McGill University.
This Policy is separate from the Portal’s Terms of Use, Data Contributor Agreement, or other CONP-related materials.
For the purposes of this Policy:
“aggregate-level data” refers to data that has been grouped together to provide information at a broader level than the initial record-level data. This data does not allow for the identification of individual records. (Adopted from definitions by Statistics Canada , the Canadian Institute for Health Information , and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development .)
“asset” refers to either a dataset, tool, or pipeline available through the CONP Portal.
“CONP” refers to the Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform.
“cookie” is a small electronic file temporarily stored on your computer that contains information about your visit to a website.
“external website” refers to any website other than that accessible at https://portal.conp.ca/.
“MCIN” refers to the McGill Centre for Integrative Neuroscience, which runs the CONP Portal.
“personal information” refers to individually identifying information for which there is a reasonable likelihood of identification.
“Portal” refers to the web interface for the CONP Portal, which is accessible at https://portal.conp.ca/ .
“public IP address” means a unique address that publicly identifies your connection on the Internet.
“Terms of Use” refers to the user agreement that governs your use of the resources available on the CONP portal. It is distinct from this Policy.
By visiting the Portal, you agree to the terms of this Policy. By your use of the Portal, you consent to the collection, use, and disclosure of your personal information in accordance with the terms contained in this Policy, which may be amended from time to time. You understand that it is your responsibility to verify any updates to this Policy.
Information about Your Visits
CONP uses the software Matomo to gather information about your visits. Thanks to Matomo, this information does not leave CONP servers, allowing CONP to maintain control of this data. When you visit and use the Portal, our server automatically collects certain technical information pertaining to your visit and use of the Portal. These include:
We use this information to improve the Portal and for reporting purposes. We do not combine this information with that from other sources to identify individual users. This technical information is retained for up to 12 months before being aggregated.
User-Submitted Survey Information
CONP uses Google Forms to survey Portal users about their experiences using the Portal. This information is not automatically collected and any user information submitted via the Google Form is entirely of the user’s choosing.
Where a Portal user chooses to submit feedback via Google Forms, the information is subject to Google’s own Privacy Policy. See also the section “Links to External Websites” below.
CONP publishes aggregate-level data about the use of the Portal both on the Portal website and in reports related to CONP’s activities.
CONP does not share any personal information with other entities or organizations, except when legally required to do so, at the request of governmental authorities conducting an investigation, to verify or enforce compliance with the policies governing the Portal and applicable laws, or to protect against misuse or unauthorized use of the Portal.
Except as described above, we will not share any information with any party for any reason.
We use cookies to:
As acceptance of the Terms of Use is a prerequisite to accessing the site, it is not possible to block this cookie and maintain site access.
In so far as the information collected is considered personal information, and within the custody of MCIN, it will not be shared with individuals and units outside of MCIN. We will not disclose personally identifiable information about your use of the site except under the following circumstances:
Due to the rapidly evolving nature of information technologies, no transmission of information over the Internet can be guaranteed to be completely secure. While CONP is committed to protecting user privacy, CONP cannot guarantee the security of any information users transmit to university sites, and users do so at their own risk.
MCIN staff, who run the CONP Portal, are subject to McGill University’s Policy on the Responsible Use of McGill Information Technology Resources . Pursuant to this policy, we have appropriate organizational and technical security measures in place in our physical facilities to protect against the loss, misuse, or alteration of information that we have collected from you at our site. We furthermore use reasonable safeguards consistent with prevailing industry standards and proportionate to the sensitivity of the data being stored to maintain the security of that information on our systems.
The Portal contains links to external websites. CONP is not responsible for the availability, content, or privacy practices of external websites. These external websites have their own policies as it relates to the collection, use, and disclosure of personal information. We invite you to consult the privacy policies of these websites to know more.
From time to time, we may use visitor information for new, unanticipated uses not previously disclosed in this Privacy Policy. In such cases, this Privacy Policy will be updated accordingly. If this is a concern, we encourage you to periodically check for changes.
Should you have any questions or concerns about this Privacy Policy, kindly send us an email at privacy@conp.ca .
The dashboard provides summary of the content available on the CONP portal. This includes the number of datasets and pipelines that can be found on the portal, links to more detailed analytics and documentation, as well as links to tutorial videos or documentation.
No login is required to access the portal but you will be asked to agree to the "Terms of Use" of the portal on your first visit. These can always be re-consulted anytime by clicking on the "Terms of Use" link at the top right of the portal web page.
Upon agreement to the "Terms of Use", you will be able to filter through the various datasets or pipelines available on the portal.
Datasets are listed in the Data search page of the portal. This search page lists all datasets available through the CONP with some basic information about the dataset. Results can be filtered or sorted easily.
Clicking on a dataset row in the Data search page will bring the user to a more detailed dataset page that includes more description information pertinent to the dataset as well as download instructions to follow using DataLad.
Note that some datasets may require a third-party account. Instructions on how to obtain an account for those datasets will be displayed on the dataset page if that is a requirement.
Below are two dataset examples, one that requires a third-party account (PREVENT-AD open data) and one that does not require any account to download it (BigBrain dataset).
This page provides more detailed information regarding a dataset. This includes contact information, dataset version, descriptions, licenses, related publication and so on.
Dataset download is available through DataLad. Each dataset page contains a detailed ‘Dataset Download Instructions’ section that lay out the different steps to perform in order to download the dataset.
Finally, the dataset README file can be viewed at the end of the page.
The Tools & Pipelines Search page lists all softwares registered in the portal. Each tool or pipeline present in that list page contains basic information about the tool/pipeline and its pipeline ID.
Clicking on a specific choice will bring the user to a more detailed page with links to instructions on how to run the tool locally, to HCPs or to external platforms.
The tool/pipeline detailed page displays all the information pertinent to the tool/pipeline. This includes authorship information, the descriptor URL, the container image information, the tool description and so on. In addition, the page provides information on how to run the tool locally or on HPCs via the CBRAIN platform or Clowdr.
Tools and pipelines can be run locally on any system using Boutiques and a container engine (Docker or Singularity) based on the Zenodo ID of the tool. The container image for the tool is listed in the detailed page of the tool/pipeline.
At the bottom of the pipeline page, detailed instructions on how to run the tool locally are available to the user.
If you have never used Boutiques in the past, we recommend the following tutorial.
Some tools and pipelines can also be run on HPCs via the CBRAIN infrastructure or in your Compute Canada account with Clowdr.
The 'Click here to begin' link under the 'Run on the CBRAIN Platform' container will open a tab to the login page of CBRAIN or to your CBRAIN account if you are already logged in.
The 'Click here for instructions' link under the 'Run on HPCs with Clowdr' will open a new tab with the instructions to follow to deploy a tool/pipeline on your Compute Canada account.
This tab contains detailed technical instructions on how to upload your dataset or pipeline to CONP.
You can publish your tools/pipelines using Boutiques’ command bosh publish.
For more information on how to do that, please visit the ‘Publishing your own tool’ section of the Boutiques tutorial Python notebook.
A dataset can be uploaded to CONP via the following mechanisms:
Each dataset to be uploaded should contain a valid DATS.json descriptors derived from schema.org. We provide a DATS GUI editor that will create a DATS.json file to ease the creation process of the DATS.json that will describe the dataset to be uploaded