GigaScience celebrates its first decade in publishing by looking to the UNESCO Open Science recommendations to assess the journal’s successes in this arena and to set its future goals
Over the last month, we have added two new groups, GigaScience and GigaByte, from the journals of the same name, increasing the number of specialist teams displaying their evaluations on Sciety.
GigaScience and GigaByte are part of GigaScience Press. With a decade-long history of open-science publishing, they aim to revolutionise publishing by promoting reproducibility of analyses and data dissemination, organisation, understanding, and use. As open-access and open-data journals, they publish all research objects (publishing data, software and workflows) from ‘big data’ studies across the life and biomedical sciences. These resources are managed using the FAIR Principles for scientific data management and stewardship, which state that research data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. They also follow the practices of transparency and openness in science publishing, and as such, they embrace open peer review (which is mandated for both journals) and preprints (which are strongly encouraged in GigaScience and mandated for GigaByte). The opportunities for combining both are covered by GigaScience in its video on open science and preprint peer review for Peer Review Week.
“In the era of computation and data-driven research, traditional methods of disseminating research are no longer fit-for-purpose. New approaches for disseminating data, methods and results are required to maximize knowledge discovery. The ‘long tail’ of small, unstructured datasets is well catered for by a number of general-purpose repositories, but there has been less support for ‘big data’. Outlined here are our experiences in attempting to tackle the gaps in publishing large-scale, computationally intensive research. GigaScience is an open-access, open-data journal aiming to revolutionize large-scale biological data dissemination, organization and re-use. Through use of the data handling infrastructure of the genomics centre BGI, GigaScience links standard manuscript publication with an integrated database (GigaDB) that hosts all associated data, and provides additional data analysis tools and computing resources. Furthermore, the supporting workflows and methods are also integrated to make published articles more transparent and open. GigaDB has released many new and previously unpublished datasets and data types, including as urgently needed data to tackle infectious disease outbreaks, cancer and the growing food crisis. Other ‘executable’ research objects, such as workflows, virtual machines and software from several GigaScience articles have been archived and shared in reproducible, transparent and usable formats. With data citation producing evidence of, and credit for, its use in the wider research community, GigaScience demonstrates a move towards more executable publications. Here data analyses can be reproduced and built upon by users without coding backgrounds or heavy computational infrastructure in a more democratized manner.”