The UCSD School of Medicine will lend a hand in the advancement of neuroscience research by providing better access to public data and tools under a new contract with the National Institutes of Health, announced Oct. 24.

The school will oversee the Neuroscience Information Framework, an online inventory of data, resources and tools available to students, scientists and anyone with Internet access.

Along with co-principal investigators Jeffrey Grethe and Amarnath Gupta, UCSD professor of neuroscience Maryann Martone will lead a collaborative project with researchers at Yale University, the California Institute of Technology, George Mason University and Washington University.

“With this new contract, we are deploying an open framework for use by scientists at all levels, as well as the general public,” Martone said.

The contract — an initiative of NIH’s Blueprint for Neuroscience Research valued at up to $10 million over the next five years — aims to integrate expertise from the fields of neuroscience, information technologies and knowledge management to enhance and maintain the NIF.

“The Neuroscience Information Framework is a vital component of the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research,” said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and a member of the cooperative Blueprint effort. “It is a pioneering endeavor to meet the enormous challenge of enabling neuroscientists to discover and share the ever-mounting, diverse inventory of tools, data, resources and knowledge generated through the Blueprint and neuroscience research efforts worldwide.”