GigaScience Press would like to congratulate Victoire Nsabatien for winning a 2024 Ben Barres Spotlight Award for his two preprints publicly reviewed and published by GigaByte. Prizes are a good way of positively reinforcing and incentivizing good practice in opening up science, and eLife should be commended creating the Ben Barres Spotlight Award for groups that are underrepresented in biology and medicine.

FUNC on Safari: Functional Metagenomics conference 2024 at Skukuza, Kruger National Park, South Africa (2nd – 5th June 2024) FMG24 participants group photo, taken outside the conference centre at Skukuza rest camp. GigaScience Press were once again proud sponsors of the Functional Metagenomics conference (FMG24). Functional Metagenomics is an area of interest for the journal, particularly via our MetaFUNC thematic series.

Plant phenotyping – the science of gathering precise information and measurements on plants – has seen massive improvements recently, and the combination of sensor technology and AI methods will continue to change the way crops are assessed and improved. A new article in GigaScience demonstrates where this is going: Jonas Bömer and colleagues at the Institute of Sugar Beet Research (Göttingen) used

The 8th World Congress on Research Integrity (WCRI) took place in Athens, Greece from 1st-5th June. GigaScience Press are regular attendees of this conference, and this year our organisation was represented by GigaScience Editor-in-Chief Scott Edmunds, Executive Editor Nicole Nogoy, and Data Scientist Chris Armit.

As an Open Science publisher we’ve pushed for transparency and access in the research that we disseminate, and in GigaByte journal we’ve just published a new open-source software tool “GetFreeCopy” that is demonstrative and addresses many features of this. To tell us more we have a Q&A with lead author Kuan-lin Huang, an Assistant Professor of Genetics and Genomics &

Today we publish a new Data Release presenting a dataset of jellyfish sightings collected by citizen scientists from 2021 through 2023 within Hong Kong waters. This is the first example where our curation team have worked with a Citizen Science project to share their observations in the GBIF biodiversity database.

The first emblematic species sequenced by the Hong Kong Biodiversity Genomics Consortium are published to coincide with International DNA Day.

The Annual International Biocuration Conference (AIBC) was held for the first in India, at the Indian Biological Data Centre (IBDC), Regional Centre for Biotechnology (RCB), Faridabad and co-hosted by the Department of Plant Molecular Biology, University of Delhi South Campus. As usual, GigaDB had representation at the event (see write-ups of many previous meetings here), Mary Ann Tuli and Chris Hunter. Both of whom were wearing two hats!

The 9th Women in Science Conference took place in Shenzhen. Below are some highlights from the conference co-organized by our Publishing Director, Laurie Goodman, and Co-Chaired by Doris Yang, from BGI-College.   Today,  March 8, 2024 marks International Women’s Day – where women’s achievement and inclusivity is celebrated.

Few countries have a biodiversity that’s comparable to Brazil’s, including plant-based food sources that are little known elsewhere.  Even in big cities you may pick all kinds of fruit directly from the tree, which can be both tasty and also interesting for the botanist. The Citizen Science project “Pomar Urbano” collects data on urban fruit-bearing plant in Brazilian cities.

Kevin Ashley’s (DCC director) closing remark at the IDCC (International Digital Curation Conference) 2024 meeting was “ Reflect, Enjoy, Do something! ”. Hopefully you will enjoy my doing something.