A difficulty in reviewing an article of this type is knowing whether one is really reviewing the article or the "product" that it describes. So I'll say something about each briefly...

The article made sense, even to this non-neuroscientist. However, I would have liked to see more information about the relationship between NeuroVault and Neurosynth (and the other databases): how they are positioned relative to each other, why one would choose one over other, how NeuroVault "leverages the power of the Neurosynth database," etc. The article appears to assume some familiarity with these; a reference is provided for Neurosynth, but not for Brainmap or Brainspell. It would also have been nice to have a figure showing an example of the API, for the software geeks among us. Finally, if I may be permitted a curmudgeonly point, the article would benefit from a little editing by a native speaker of English; the various grammatical errors do not make for easy reading.

I logged on to NeuroVault and explored the "Add new collection" process. The look of the site is clean and modern, and performance is fast. I was slightly surprised at how many of the description fields that accompany a collection upload are in free text format. This will cause problems over time due to typos, different interpretations of terms, etc. In some cases, even if the number of possibilities for a field is such that it cannot be changed into a dropdown list, it might be advantageous to provide a partial list with an "Other..." option, that causes the free-text box to appear. In my experience of comparable systems in a non-academic setting, archiving of the data tends to be assigned to the intern, who has little incentive to be able to retrieve it three years hence, so it may be worth "idiot-proofing" the system even at the expense of rapidity of use.

The concept of sharing massive amounts of data in this way is a great example of what can be done for relatively little expense (as long as someone is crazy enough to put all those hours into writing the software!). My slight concern would be keeping the management and maintenance structures going as people change jobs, change institutions, and even perhaps lose interest (!). The amount of effort that people are prepared to put into creating free/open-source software is almost unlimited; their enthusiasm for getting out of bed at 4am on a Sunday to repair the SQL indexes again because of a still-not-fixed bug, not so much. Hopefully, if NeuroVault becomes sufficiently successful to need that level of support, appropriate funding will be available to pay for professional management.