Open access publisher BioMed Central, UK, and BGI, one of the world’s largest genomics institutes, have announced the launch of GigaScience, a new open access, open data journal with a scope that embraces all life science research that generates ‘big data’.
This launch is a major first step towards the open access publication of complete, reproducible accounts of all parts of data-intensive scientific research projects. Together GigaScience and its integrated database GigaDB provide scientific analyses, full dataset hosting, and access to the software tools used to conduct these analyses, along with publication of more traditional scientific articles describing the studies.
Having all these together finally allows readers to not only glean the scientific conclusions in the papers, but also to directly test these using the underlying data and analysis tools. In this way, the new journal seeks to help overcome the growing problem of the lack of reproducibility of research.
GigaScience publications also include Digital Object Identifier (DOIs) for all datasets in the journal database, GigaDB. This helps make datasets more permanent, as well as fully track-able, discoverable, linkable, and citable, which traditionally has only been possible for journal articles. Citation enables scientists, who generate these enormous datasets and share them with the community, to gain more appropriate credit for their contributions to research.
In addition to this innovative, big-data-driven publication format the journal also provides reviews and commentaries that address the many hurdles that still need to be surmounted to improve future big-data handling.
BioMed Central and the GigaScience editors will be marking the journal’s launch at the ISMB conference (booth number 36), scheduled for July 15-17, 2012.
