Open access publisher BioMed Central and the Beijing Genome Institute (BGI) have announced that the journal GigaScience will unveil new features and functionality at the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) meeting. The move comes one year on from the launch of the journal.
As well as a print issue celebrating the best of the last year, GigaScience is announcing new features and tools for academics, along with a new data analysis platform, GigaGalaxy. GigaGalaxy is an online platform that supports the reproducibility of data analyses. It provides a means to share computational tools and workflows that further document and reproduce data analyses reported in papers published in the journal.
Through GigaGalaxy, GigaScience offers method publishing and sharing workflows and analyses in a transparent, executable manner: http://galaxy.cbiit.cuhk.edu.hk/.
GigaDB is a repository to host data and tools associated primarily with articles in GigaScience. The database recently re-launched with a new look, new functionality, and updated browsing options. GigaDB also offers Aspera data transfer, which can be up to 100x faster than FTP, and a clear benefit for academics handling huge datasets. Through an association with DataCite, datasets and methods in GigaDB will be assigned a DOI that can be used as a standard citation for future use of these data in other articles by the authors and other researchers.
GigaScience has over 50 datasets, and more than 25TB of data, to date. As well as extending to a broader range of fields producing mega-datasets, the journal is able to track how datasets have been used. Many of the unpublished BGI datasets released on the platform have been used by other projects, and this has not prevented publication of genome papers at a later date.
Executive Editor Scott Edmunds will be at ISMB in Berlin from July 21. He will be on BioMed Central's booth #18 and also coordinating and speaking in a workshop on July 22, on 'What Bioinformaticians need to know about digital publishing beyond the PDF'.
