Meetings In the Time of Coronavirus: Conferences go Viral June-July usually marks peak conference season when the GigaScience team is on the road, but with the COVID-19 pandemic shutting down travel and public gatherings it has been a strangely static summer.

Just out in GigaScience is a new paper presenting Rice Galaxy, an open resource for plant science using the Galaxy workflow management system we are so fond of. The authors from the International Rice Research Institute in the Phillipines are winners of our 2018 ICG13 Prize, and as this is the final paper to be published we can now present a summary of the  competition.

This is the Dawning of the Age of Aequatus Our ICG Prize is over now for another year, and we’ll shortly follow up with an announcement on which of the six winners won the $1000 first prize. To help you see how great all the entries were we will introduce and profile some of the winning papers.

While the Guardians of the Galaxy film franchise has just released its second film, the GigaScience Galaxy series has just published its 10 ^th , 11 ^th and 12 ^th papers.

Björn Grüning modelling one of our t-shirts. Nowadays, massive amounts of diverse data are generated in biomedical research. To manage it and extract useful information, bioinformatic solutions are needed and software must be developed. The development of a tool should always follow a similar process.

The genomics community has been held up as an exemplar in data sharing practices since the human genome project, but the metabolomics community is catching up fast, with the Metabolights database being the fast growing repository at the EBI.

**Open is the New Black **While the internet might still be raging over Tim Hunt’s comments about # distractlingsexy gender issues in the lab, and to a lesser extent Lior Pachtor’s recent provocative blog on the “myths” of bioinformatics code availability and licensing, here in Dublin this years BOSC conference was clear as ever about where they stand on both issues.

The 2014 International Conference on Systems Biology (ICSB) was hosted in Australia’s most livable city and event, sport, culture and food capital – that is Melbourne, with GigaScience being proud to be one of the media partners.

The upcoming 2014 Galaxy Community Conference (GCC2014) has just opened early registration, and following from our series announced at the last meeting we are renewing our call for papers for our special thematic focused series on studies utilizing large-scale datasets and workflows.

Push the button! GigaScience moves toward more interactive articles Research articles are being published with increasingly large and complicated supporting datasets, together with the software code used in analyses of the data.