Today, we celebrate a major milestone: The manuscript describing the NODES Delphi study has been published as a preprint on PsyArxiv and is available to download here. From the preregistration on April 30, 2025 to the publication of the preprint on June 15, 2025 – this project was a big group effort and highlights what cooperations can achieve!
So, what did we find? We invited an international panel of psychoneuroendocrinology (PNE) researchers to participate in a Delphi study, asking them to rate their agreement with statements about how PNE data should be structured, labeled, and shared. In the end, 50 researchers participated in the final round and consensus was reached for 80 out of 84 statements (95%). That is a strong signal: the PNE community agrees not only that a data standard is needed, but also on many of its core components. Experts converged on the idea of a modular, flexible system that can accommodate the full diversity of PNE research, from human stress studies to animal and in vitro work, while ensuring that the data structure remains comparable across studies. There was also strong agreement that implementation should be as low-burden as possible, with user-friendly tools rather than coding requirements.
What comes next? These findings lay the groundwork for the next phase of NODES: translating community consensus into concrete data format specifications. We will pilot these specifications in real datasets, refine them based on usability and interoperability feedback, and work towards open-source tools that make it easy for researchers to structure and share their data in a standardized way. Watch this space – and reach out if you want to get involved (maria.meier@uni-konstanz.de)!