Stuck indoors and bored of passively reading information on the coronavirus (and more) when you could be doing something more constructive? GigaScience now has hypothes.is integration for collaborative annotation, and we would encourage readers to interact with our content more collaboratively.

**Over 200 participants spent three eventful days in Berlin last week to discuss ideas, ongoing projects and future developments around Open Science. As an appropriate location to demonstrate the benefits of breaking down barriers, the motto of FORCE2017 was “Changing the culture”. While most of the GigaScience team was in Shenzhen for ICG, Hans Zauner was on hand in what is one of our favourite meetings.

Cheering Ourselves up with CUDDEL(s) and Hackathons We have been working closely with the Metabolomics community for a few years now, participating in hackathon events including BYO Data parties and Hack-the-Spec – ISA as a FAIR research object – thanks to our collaboration with the ISA Team at the Oxford e-Research Centre and funding from our BBSRC UK-China partnering award.

The Leader of the Curation Pack. At GigaScience we are keen to maximise the use and utility of our published data, narrative and other research objects.

**The Giga-Curation Challenge 2016 **Annotation and curation are under appreciated parts of scholarship, because they allow someone to provide additional insight into a work, and are needed for efficient and easy re-use.

“ To enable a conversation over the world’s knowledge ” is the slogan for Hypothes.is, a open annotation layer that allows anyone to annotate anything.

Seek and Deploy. If you’re a user of GigaDB (and why wouldn’t you be!) you’ll perhaps have been wondering why the search function is so slow and often missing obvious results! Well even if you’re not wondering, I can tell you that this has now been fixed.

**What is BioCuration?

A Grassroots Funding effort in Puerto Rico enables genome sequencing of the critically endangered Puerto Rican parrot The rationale and scope for GigaScience has been to cover and provide a home for the growing number of studies producing and handling large-scale biological data, and this “big-data” data bonanza is not just due to well funded labs, but an increasingly globalized and distributed network of researchers.

Type any scientific term into any search engine and its pretty much guaranteed that a Wikipedia article will be the first hit.