Imagine you would like to study a plant species of interest, say for its ability to supply food, fiber, fuel or just to gain a deeper scientific understanding. Two approaches immediately come to mind: an understanding of its underlying genetics and an understanding of plant phenomics, which spans how the genes express themselves across huge length scales from the microscopic to the whole plant itself.

The great responsibility Every discipline of science is unique.  Ecology is no exception.  We work in diverse, complex, context-dependent systems. Global change and anthropogenic influences are very real issues for the health of the planet that ecologists often examine.  As a discipline, we have moved from context-dependent, local studies to much larger, integrated studies.

In support of Brain Awareness Week, we have asked Cameron Craddock, Director of the Computational NeuroImaging Lab, Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research and Director of Imaging, Child Mind Institute, to write a blog highlighting open science in neuroimaging, and to announce our upcoming publication of the 2015 Brainhack Proceedings and the Brainhack Thematic Series.

The genomics community has been held up as an exemplar in data sharing practices since the human genome project, but the metabolomics community is catching up fast, with the Metabolights database being the fast growing repository at the EBI.

Last Christmas we gave you our heart; okay forget George Michael – we gave you beautiful imaging data sets, Virtual Machines, BYO data parties, GigaGitHub, more open peer review plus much more.

**Pregnant Starfish go Big Data. **Brittle stars are a class of organisms that are closely related to starfish. While most members of this group reproduce externally, there are some species that develop their young internally and ‘give birth’ to live young.

Ecology data in the 21st Century: multiscaled, and with “big” potential At GigaScience we are always promoting and finding new ways to foster open data, open science and reproducibility.

With our focus on large-scale biological data, mass spectrometry has been one area of particular interest and attention. Metabolomics involves the detection and quantification of small molecules (metabolites) in living organisms using mass spectrometers.

**What is BioCuration?

The software application PLINK is one of the most widely used tools in bioinformatics, particularly for genome-wide association studies (GWAS) that look at genetic variants in different individuals to see if any variant is associated with a trait. With the advent of the thousand dollar genome, the computational demands being made on such programs are exploding.