GigaScience

“GigaScience aims to revolutionize data dissemination, organization, understanding, and use. An online open-access open-data journal, we publish 'big-data' studies from the entire spectrum of life and biomedical sciences. To achieve our goals, the journal has a novel publication format: one that links standard manuscript publication with an extensive database that hosts all associated data and provides data analysis tools and cloud-computing resources. Our scope covers not just 'omic' type data and the fields of high-throughput biology currently serviced by large public repositories, but also the growing range of more difficult-to-access data, such as imaging, neuroscience, ecology, cohort data, systems biology and other new types of large-scale sharable data... GigaScience is a new integrated database and journal co-published in collaboration between BGI Shenzhen and BioMed Central, to meet the needs of a new generation of biological and biomedical research as it enters the era of ‘big-data.’ BGI (formerly known as Beijing Genomics Institute) was founded in 1999 and has since become the largest genomic organization in the world and has a proven track record of innovative, high profile research. To achieve its goals, GigaScience has developed a novel publishing format that integrates manuscript publication with a database that will provide DOI assignment to every dataset. Supporting the open-data movement, we require that all supporting data and source code be publically available in a suitable public repository and/or under a public domain CC0 license in the BGI GigaScience database. Using the BGI cloud as a test environment, we also consider open-source software tools/methods for the analysis or handling of large-scale data. When submitting a manuscript, please contact us if you have datasets or cloud applications you would like us to host. To maximize data usability submitters are encouraged to follow best practice for metadata reporting and are given the opportunity to submit in ISA-Tab format.”