General rightsCopyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.• Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ? Take down policyIf you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim.

Brain function depends on segregation and integration of information processing in brain networks often separated by long-range anatomical connections. Neuronal oscillations orchestrate such distributed processing through transient amplitude and phase coupling; however, little is known about local network properties facilitating these functional connections. Here, we test whether criticality—a dynamical state characterized by scale-free oscillations—optimizes the capacity of neuronal networks to couple through amplitude or phase, and transfer information. We coupled in silico networks with varying excitatory and inhibitory connectivity, and found that phase coupling emerges at criticality, and that amplitude coupling, as well as information transfer, are maximal when networks are critical. Our data support the idea that criticality is important for local and global information processing and may help explain why brain disorders characterized by local alterations in criticality also exhibit impaired long-range synchrony, even prior to degeneration of physical connections.