From deadly E. coli to endangered polar bears: GigaScience provides first citable data

"BioMed Central and BGI launch a new integrated database and journal, to meet the needs of a new generation of biological and biomedical research as it enters the era of "big-data." GigaScience, an innovative new journal and integrated database to be launched by BioMed Central in November 2011, has released their first datasets to be given a Digital Object Identifier (DOI). This enables a long-needed way to properly recognize the data producers who have provided an untold number of essential resources to the entire research community. This not only promotes very rapid data release, but also provides easy access, reuse, tracking, and most importantly permanency for such datasets....The datasets, created by BGI and its collaborators in Germany and in the Genome10K project, include the sequence and assembly data from the recent deadly outbreak strain E. coli O104, and 7 large vertebrates....GigaScience has been working with the DataCite organization and the British Library to enable datasets to be given DOIs. A primary goal for creating dataset DOIs is to promote extremely rapid data release and dissemination. And, in keeping with this, the majority of the above datasets are available prior to the publication of their associated scientific journal articles. Given that such publication is currently the only effective means for data producers to obtain credit for their work, this normally creates extensive delays in data availability due to the long writing, reviewing, and editing processes needed for article publication. This can seriously impede the speed at which scientific discoveries are made...."