nitrc:Testimonials
From NITRC Wiki
Fact: I have frequently heard from NIH study sections that reviewers asked if a grant application share their data or informatics tools on NITRC. NITRC has become a de facto standard mechanism for sharing neuroimaging and related data and tools. NITRC NIH Project Officer
NITRC is the first place I look if I want to know what neuroimaging analysis packages are available. It truly serves as a clearinghouse, a centralized spot to look for what's available to the research community. It is an excellent site for disseminating software and tools; as soon as anyone says they have neuroimaging-related software to share I always ask, Is it on NITRC?
You are awesome! This is the type of service that wins awards!... It has greatly reduced the cost of managing [our] software development, and it has been an incredible resource for sharing resources with collaborators around the world. Administrator of 27 listed tools; 25 chose NITRC as their only distribution mechanism.
I plan to use this project as a collaboration tool to share my research code in Neuroimaging with my collaborators. I opted for NITRC because of its Wiki, Forum, Mailing List and Survey functionalities. I heard good reviews of NITRC and will be happy to try it out. Thank you for this great resource to foster research in our field! Administrator of three listed tools that chose NITRC as their only distribution mechanism.
Just wanted to say that the new layout on the NITRC site looks fantastic. Please pass my thanks to the people who helped to update it. Administrator of one listed tool that chose NITRC as its only distribution mechanism.
Chairing of the Neurotechnology B Study Section, we consistently hear reviewers use NITRC as one of the most valuable sources for determining whether a particular neuroimaging tool - or other application - is used by the community. The tool or application's user ratings and reviews, numbers of downloads, and other activity such as forum discussions and documentation, are sited frequently as a way to know whether a tool is in widespread use and has value. Also, many PIs state that their tool will be listed on NITRC so as to increase the potential impact of the tool by getting information about it out to a large section of the community.
Wow! I love the new site... even more than the old site. Administrator/developer of over 10 listed tools that chose NITRC as their only distribution mechanism.
As a software contributor, NITRC has been very useful in distributing my software. As it has a rather large database attached to it, it requires significant bandwidth and storage. If not for NITRC's facilities, we would have needed funding to purchase much better web service for the lab's website, not to mention to pay for a web site that is as easy to use as it is. Finally, it is very useful to have a single place to submit (or link) one's software/data that requires no advertising effort - most everyone looking for brain imaging software knows where to go to get it now. NITRC has been a huge assistance to the medical image software community and to neuroscience researchers. It would be hard to imagine going forward without the NITRC resource. Administrator of one listed tool on NITRC.
I believe that NITRC has become an invaluable service to my organization…and strongly feel that it plays a crucial role in the neuroinformatics and neuroimaging community. Administrator of two listed tools; one chose NITRC as its only distribution mechanism.
NITRC has been a huge assistance to the medical image software community and to neuroscience researchers….
- First, it has been useful to us in providing a group development environment for our software. Although it is certainly possible to find other environments that provide this resource, the commonality of software on NITRC makes it particularly desirable as the development and the delivery locations are the same.
- Second, NITRC has been a great resource to identify tools that might be of most use to the community. From comments provided to measures of popularity, the site provides valuable information.
- Third, as we all drive toward "best practices" and maximum usability, it is very useful to have the software made searchable according to multiple criteria, including importantly the license restrictions.
Finally, the NITRC developers have been very responsive to users’ needs while dutifully aware of the need for a stable, dependable website. It is a professional resource that is a bit rare (unfortunately) in the academic software development setting…. Administrator of five listed tools that chose NITRC as their only distribution mechanism.
So far I really like [the redesign], not just the Participate! box, but the whole new arrangement of the project pages, as well as the site's front page. I think the "download now” box is really well done….I'm still finding new things… I haven't found anything to complain about so far, and I think the redesign makes much better use of real estate (and is slicker at the same time)….I think it's a real step forward. Administrator of one listed tool on NITRC; member of a NITRC community resource.
First and foremost, it creates a single central destination where tool users and tool developers can fulfill each other’s needs. For users, NITRC offers the ability to make sense of the large number of available tools, and to use rankings and comments by other users to quickly make decisions about adopting tools. For developers, NITRC offers a unique opportunity to reach potential users, as well as to collect essential feedback about their tools. Administrator of three listed tools; two chose NITRC as its only distribution mechanism.
All my funding and downloads for my … analysis software has come from NITRC, so yes it has been very helpful! Administrator of one listed tool that chose NITRC as its only distribution mechanism.
[We] are extremely satisfied with our interactions with NITRC…. We depend on NITRC to freely distribute our community-based software … We feel that NITRC is an excellent resource for both experienced and new researchers in the field. It provides a comprehensive view of available neuroimaging tools and resources, and serves to free up time for the tool generators to focus on tool development. Administrator of one listed tool on NITRC.
I think you guys are doing a fantastic job …. We have now started moving all our tool development onto NITRC due to the excellent infrastructure and would have tremendous problems to go back to former local setup. Especially in today’s research world, where we collaborate on several projects with multiple sites to develop jointly neuroimaging tools, it is a necessity to have a central resource like NITRC. On top of the high quality of the NITRC resources, it is also a ‘neutral’ resource. In our earlier development work, the tool sites were always local to an university and thus in cross-site development, there was always discussion for which university to host the tools. Not just has that discussion been eliminated, the services offered by NITRC is unparalleled as compared to local setups and thus has considerably simplified the dissemination of our tools…. Administrator of eight listed tools that chose NITRC as their only distribution mechanism.
I am the lead developer of …a popular medical image segmentation tool [and]… would like to … express my sincere and thorough satisfaction with this excellent resource. NITRC serves a role that is unique and highly useful to neuroimaging tool developers like myself. First and foremost, it creates a single central destination where tool users and tool developers can fulfill each others needs. For users, NITRC offers the ability to make sense of the large number of available tools, and to use rankings and comments by other users to quickly make decisions about adopting tools. For developers, NITRC offers a unique opportunity to reach potential users, as well as to collect essential feedback about their tools. In addition, NITRC offers extensive facilities for software development and maintenance….Lastly, NITRC has put together an excellent team of motivated people... This team has been extremely responsive to developer needs and has made continuous tangible improvements to NITRC….For NIH-funded open-source software tools … reaching as many users as possible is one of our biggest goals, as that reduces the per-user cost of tool development and generates greater value for the NIH investment. … I feel strongly that NITRC is an excellent resource from which both users and developers of neuroimaging tools benefit strongly…. Administrator of three listed tools that chose NITRC as their only distribution mechanism.
For us, the decision to use NITRC for hosting our tools and resources, rather than local servers, was largely based on the consideration that we do not want to run publicized services (e.g., bug tracker, SVN) on our lab machines and thus invite intruders along with the proper users. So basically, by having NITRC, labs like ours can keep their IT systems, which contain sensitive data, shut off and more secure. As far as funding for our current projects is concerned, we decided to go NITRC only after receiving funding for hosting one project… but having NITRC around allowed us to easily build a presence for a second project… for which there was no infrastructure funding. Basically, NITRC allowed us to make an ad hoc decision to share data that was created as a by-product of other research without its own financial resources. Administrator of two listed tools that chose NITRC as their only distribution mechanism.
The NITRC project provides an essential service to the fields of basic and clinical translational neuroscience research. In my role as an author and editor in the domain of neuroimaging I use NITRC as a resource for archiving essential information about image analysis software and sharable data sets. In my role as a teacher and training director, I use NITRC as a resource for educating the next generation of image analysis developers/programmers as well as applied basic and clinical scientists. Most of not all of the software analysis tools in current use are indexed here. The community built around this resource is growing.
The NITRC is the best organization to share the state-of-art achievement in the neuroscience and medical research. It boosts the fascinating research activity in the life science. We always download [tools] for our research use in medical imaging with clinical application. These research are in the process of being published.
I think NITRC is a great website…. I have used it to see if there are new tools available and if a tool I am thinking of creating is already available. Combining the internet and neuroimaging has to be the way forward…
NITRC has proven to be a valuable research resource for my lab and the broader neuroimaging community. …we have downloaded various software packages from NITRC and used them to perform a variety of neuroimaging tasks, as well as compare our own software algorithms against established methods. Also, the software system we distribute via NITRC… has been downloaded 30 times and at least one other neuroimaging lab has reviewed a part of it on NITRC… Because this software performs low-level data management, it is usually not mentioned in publications, but it has had a diffuse, time-saving impact on my lab and those of my collaborators.
We are routinely using tool downloads and documentations from NITRC in our research. When I am looking for a tool to do a specific job (e.g. DTI registration), the place I will go to look for the best tool is NITRC. If it's not on NITRC then it does not exist. NITRC provides an immense resource for the field in general and to my lab in specific. Our papers usually do not cite/acknowledge NITRC directly, but we regularly acknowledge tools featured on NITRC…
We would like to extend our sincere thanks for providing a platform to share our solutions with the rest of the research community. Since sharing our resources on NITRC we've seen a large amount of incoming web traffic from your site. These referrals tend to be very interested visitors as they spend double the average amount of time on our site compared to other visitors.
I'm not sure how much non-US feedback helps…but I'm a regular user of nitrc.org. I use it to learn about existing tools in specific areas like non-uniformity correction, but also to see what is available other than what our lab is currently using. I also like the conferences and workshop listings.
NITRC has turned out to be very helpful as a collaboration site, and I believe it is well worth sustaining. We are a 'Core' group … meaning our primary function is support of the research community (develop methods, write software, provide instruction, etc). To this end, the NITRC site has been very useful for things like…a host site for collaboration on file formats, used for data exchange between software packages… Such collaboration generally spans groups across the US (or world), and it is very useful to have a centralized site that everyone has access to….NITRC is a very cost effective tool for the research community as a whole. This site takes large burdens off of research groups, allowing them to focus on the research, rather than on how to administer a good web site. One team can excel at making a useful web site. Individual groups will clearly not tend to do so well.
NITRC is a fantastic software resource that is really just starting to get off the ground as more people are finding out about it.
I have found NITRC to be incredibly informative and useful. The longer it is able to stay around the more popular it will become. There is nothing else like it on the web that I have found, and it is very well formatted and maintained….
I believe that NITRC is a great service, I regularly use it to look for new tools. I also use it to look for updates of tools I have used for some time.
Open-source software and open-access resources are a powerful strength of the neuroimaging community, and NITRC has been essential in maintaining this philosophy. Personally, I have downloaded software that assisted with …publication.
I have downloaded several tools from NITRC …. I find the site useful as a consolidated location for neuroimaging resources.
I appreciate NITRC site a lot - it is a kind of web 2.0 service for imaging neuroscience community and facilitates data sharing and communication about new tools and resources. I used it for my research however most of the results were not published yet...
I have published …papers in which I have used tools downloaded from the NITRC.
Thanks for creating this open space for sharing.
