Open-sourcing RexDB®: How to package a successful open-source project as a data management platform used extensively in autism research.

The need for effective centralized management of biomedical and behavioral research data has expanded dramatically in the past decade. Interdisciplinary, longitudinal, and multi-center research benefits from secure, flexible data management platforms. Current solutions are either insufficiently flexible or too expensive. Our team has developed an integrated data management platform used at over a dozen leading autism research centers over the last 6 years. In late 2011, we began to package this platform, originally developed as a mix of proprietary and open-source components, as an open-source project with the goal of making it freely available to all autism research centers and programs.