Does curation matter? An example from SPARC.science

SPARC.science is a data repository that is similar to a generalist repository in that it takes datasets of many types from imaging to electrophysiology and immunochemistry, provided that the data concern the peripheral nervous system. In 2019 SPARC brought onboard curators to improve data quality along with a developer team to automate tasks where it made sense to do so (Marroquin et al 2024 DOI:10.21105/joss.06140; Bandrowski et al, 2021 DOI:10.1101/2021.02.10.430563; Osanlouy et al, 2021 DOI:10.3389/fphys.2021.693735). In this dataset we examine the role that curation plays in the quality of data that is released. The dataset contains one spreadsheet with three tabs: included datasets, excluded datasets, and a data dictionary.