MASiVar participants.tsv contains non-unique participant_id - BIDS validator reports TSV_INDEX_VALUE_NOT_UNIQUE

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Hi all,

I ran the official BIDS validator (v2.2.3) on the MASiVar dataset (OpenNeuro ds003416) and got a large number of errors of the form:

[ERROR] TSV_INDEX_VALUE_NOT_UNIQUE An index column(s) was specified for the tsv file and not all of the values for it are unique.
        /participants.tsv - Row: 3, Value: sub-cIs1
        /participants.tsv - Row: 4, Value: sub-cIs1

        70 more files with the same issue

The problem is that participants.tsv contains multiple rows for the same participant_id (same sub-<label>) with different session_id values. From my understanding, the BIDS spec requires exactly one row per participant in participants.tsv, and session-level information should be represented using sessions.tsv or session-level files. So this looks non-compliant to me, but OpenNeuro says that there are no errors !

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My question for the community is : What does OpenNeuro use for BIDS validation ? And why is ds003416 marked as “Valid” despite failing the current validator ?

Thanks!

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The dataset was uploaded back in 2021. I think that the validator has probably not been run since the last release was made, which means that those validation results probably come from the old validator (i.e., the JS-based one that didn’t use the schema).