Since the very start of GigaScience we’ve been strong proponents of Data Citation, helping promote and practice the procedure of affording data the same importance in the scholarly record as citations of other research objects such as publications (see examples of this in GigaBlog and BMC Res Notes ). These efforts by the wider community culminated

GigaScience Presses new GigaByte Journal was launched with the goal of speeding up the dissemination of science, publishing at the speed of research . Beyond speeding up the research process by incentivizing the early release of datasets and software/computational workflows by focusing on short descriptions of these two article types (called Data Release and Technical Release), we’ve also tried to greatly speed up the normally

GigaScience has always had a focus on reproducibility rather than subjective impact, and it can be challenging for our reviewers to judge this, especially now that more and more tools are being created – bringing data science to the masses.  This also means more efficiency and ease is required especially when multiple collaborators and contributors on a specific project are involved.

This week in GigaScience we published the genome of the mediterranean cone snail, Lautoconus ventricosus . Cone snails produce a wide variety of powerful toxins and the new chromosome-scale genome assembly opens the door for detailed investigations of their diversity and evolution. Cone snails are beloved by collectors for their often beautiful shells, but they are infamous because of their powerful venom.

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) hosted the two-day virtual workshop “Changing the Culture of Data Management and Sharing” on 28th-29th April 2021 to discuss the challenges and opportunities for establishing effective data management and sharing practices and exploring the question of universal availability of scientific data.

The International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF) hosted their Neuroinformatics Assembly on 19 ^th -23 ^rd April 2021. This conference aims to highlight open innovation in neuroscience, and additionally to showcase recently developed software tools and data infrastructures.

The dizzying complexity of biological systems necessitates an abundance of tools that allow researchers to understand the deluge of sequence, structural, and systems-level data that is being generated in cell, molecular, and developmental biology.

This week in GigaScience we published research revealing a previously hidden diversity of symbiotic bacteria from the genus Rickettsia , spanning a wide range of arthropod hosts. Using accidentally amplified sequence data from a barcoding database as a starting point, the results will help to better understand the co-evolution of these intimate symbioses.

Open Data in the Third Dimension Data are not just ephemeral units of magnetisation sitting on computer hard drives. The linking of the word to storable computer information only goes back to the mid-20 ^th century, but the use of the latin word data in English goes back to at least the 17 ^th Century.

Following our efforts promoting open science and “community genomics” projects that have included the “Peoples Parrot” , community cactus, and our very own Bauhinia Genome, today we have a guest posting from the Transbiome team.

GigaScience Press and River Valley Technologies, with the help of Stencila, launch their first interactive “ Executable Research Article ” from their new scientific journal, GigaByte.