GigaScience, Giga-database and now GigaBlog: new resources for the big-data community

"As biological data is now produced faster than it can easily be handled and stored, the dissemination of this data has become a major bottleneck. GigaScience: a new type of journal from BioMed Central and BGI — no stranger to these issues being the world’s largest Genomics center — starts taking submissions today with the goal of addressing many of the issues surrounding “big-data”. Much of the rationale and features of the GigaScience journal and its associated database is presented on our website....As part of our prelaunch activities, GigaScience has just released its first datasets that are marked with a citable DOI and have no restrictions on use. These datasets include the sequence and assembly data from the recent deadly outbreak strain E. coli O104 from BGI and the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf, as well as 7 large vertebrates sequenced for the Genome10K project, a worldwide collaborative effort to sequence 10,000 vertebrate genomes...."