Giant first birthday for GigaScience
19 Jul 2013
One year on from the launch of BioMed Central and BGI’s Open Access journal GigaScience, the journal will unveil new features and functionality at the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) meeting this week.
As well as a print issue celebrating the best of the last year, GigaScience is announcing new features and tools for academics, along with a new data analysis platform, GigaGalaxy. GigaGalaxy is an online platform that supports the reproducibility of data analyses. It provides a means to share computational tools and workflows that further document and reproduce data analyses reported in papers published in the journal. Through GigaGalaxy, GigaScience offers method publishing and sharing workflows and analyses in a transparent, executable manner: http://galaxy.cbiit.cuhk.edu.hk/
GigaDB is a repository to host data and tools associated primarily with articles in GigaScience. The database recently relaunched with a new look, new functionality, and updated browsing options. GigaDB also offers Aspera data transfer, which can be up to 100x faster than FTP, and a clear benefit for academics handling huge datasets. Through an association with DataCite, datasets and methods in GigaDB will be assigned a DOI that can be used as a standard citation for future use of these data in other articles by the authors and other researchers. http://gigadb.org/
GigaScience has over 50 datasets, and more than 25TB of data, to date. As well as extending to a broader range of fields producing mega-datasets, the journal is able to track how datasets have been used. Many of the unpublished Beijing Genome Institute (BGI) datasets released on the platform have been used by other projects, and this has not prevented publication of genome papers at a later date. The pigeon genome was released in July 2011, and with its main genome only published in Science in early 2013. Between these dates it has enabled other researchers to use it without restriction and publish work on the genes involved in pigeon milk. Several groups have also used released but unpublished polar bear genome data in comparative and population genetics studies for various bear species.
Executive Editor Scott Edmunds will be at ISMB in Berlin from July 21. He will be on BioMed Central’s booth #18 and also coordinating and speaking in a workshop on July 22, on ‘What Bioinformaticians need to know about digital publishing beyond the PDF’.
-ENDS-
Media Contact
Ruth Francis
Head of Communication, BioMed Central
Tel: +44 20 3192 2737
Mobile: +44 7825 287 546
E-mail: ruth.francis@biomedcentral.com
Notes to Editors
1. GigaScience aims to revolutionize data dissemination, organization, understanding, and use. An online open-access open-data journal, we publish 'big-data' studies from the entire spectrum of life and biomedical sciences. To achieve our goals, the journal has a novel publication format: one that links standard manuscript publication with an extensive database that hosts all associated data and provides data analysis tools and cloud-computing resources.
2. BioMed Central (http://www.biomedcentral.com/) is an STM (Science, Technology and Medicine) publisher which has pioneered the open access publishing model. All peer-reviewed research articles published by BioMed Central are made immediately and freely accessible online, and are licensed to allow redistribution and reuse. BioMed Central is part of Springer Science+Business Media, a leading global publisher in the STM sector. @BioMedCentral
3. The annual international conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) is the major meeting of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB). Over the past twenty years the ISMB conference has grown to become the world's largest bioinformatics/computational biology conference, and ISMB/ECCB 2013 will be the year's most important computational biology event globally.
