Assuring Appropriate Authorship. In our day-to-day work at GigaScience many of the most common and reoccurring problems we keep encountering relate to appropriate authorship. In this “publish or perish” world of science, getting authorship right is of course important.

**That Was The Review Week That Was **If you’ve seen the #peerrevwk15 hashtag on social media, you may have noticed this week is the first ever Peer Review Week.

3000 Rice Genome Sequences Made Publicly Available on World Hunger Day Yesterday marked the publication in GigaScience of the first data from the 3,000 Rice Genomes Project, a collaboration between the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS), the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), and BGI; as well as a commentary from the Directors of these institutes outlining the goals of this ambitious project.

New research and data published in GigaScience and PLOS ONE provides complete open access to detailed 3D images of earthworms To quote the American cartoonist Gary Larson: all things play a role in nature, even the lowly worm—but perhaps never in such a visually stunning way as that presented in two papers published last week in GigaScience and PLOS ONE . The work and data presented here

Being the largest land predator, the fearsome and enigmatic Polar Bear is seen by many as a powerful symbol to highlight of the threats to the environment through global warming.

Last week we published our first neuroscience data note containing 10GB of fMRI data hosted and integrated into the paper by a DOI to our GigaDB database. While we have published a number of genomics datasets and data notes (see the Puerto Rican Parrot genome data note and its associated data DOI), this is a nice example of us providing a home for “orphan data”, the long tail of data types without community agreed curated repositories.

Insect goo aids biodiversity research Apologies to Jonathan Eisen (see Badomics in the journal), but today in GigaScience we publish a new “squishomics” approach for assessing and understanding biodiversity, using the slightly wacky sounding method of combining DNA-soup made from crushed-up insects and the latest sequencing technology.

The worm that turned (epigenetics) GigaDB, GigaScience ’s associated database, has had a number of new datasets just added, many for data types previously not hosted. Today marks the publication of new research in our sister BMC journal Genome Biology shaking up the epigenetics field by shattering the assumption that DNA methylation is absent in nematodes.

A correspondence we have contributed to has just been published in the BMC Research Notes “Data standardization, sharing and publication series” on the adventures in data-citation and data-release practices surrounding the Sorghum genome that is available in our GigaDB database and that was published last year in Genome Biology . We use Sorghum as an example to highlight the issues surrounding data release and use strong words,

Another incremental step has been achieved for the adoption of the practice of data citation; this week, Nature Biotechnology has included one of our dataset DOIs in their references for the first time.