Open Science has emerged into the mainstream, primarily due to concerted efforts from various individuals, institutions, and initiatives. This small, focused gathering brought together several of those community leaders.  The purpose of the meeting was to define common goals, discuss common challenges, and coordinate on common efforts.

Following our efforts promoting open science and “community genomics” projects such as the “Peoples Parrot” ** and Azolla “crowdfernded” genome , today we have a guest posting from Peng Jiang and Hui Guo at the University of Georgia covering their crowdfunding efforts to** sequence the first Cactus genome .  While

Following from his guest blog in October on “Approaches and resources to slow the spread of infection”, Michael Dean from the Center of Cancer Research at the NIH uses his data oriented approach to give an update of where the Ebola epidemic is. While there may be less media coverage (apart from in the UK), this doesn’t relate to the situation on the ground.

**The Ebola pandemic presents one of the most terrifying world health crises in modern times, with devastating consequences in Western Africa [as this goes to press there are now over 10,000 infections and almost 5,000 deaths]. There is a vast amount of data on this crisis available in rapidly published articles and on the internet (check out PLOS Currents: Outbreaks in particular), including past and current numbers of infected;

Here we present a guest blog by our Editorial Board Member Russell Poldrack, Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, who highlights the challenges and opportunities surrounding imaging data to enable the neuroscience community to “stand on the shoulders of giants”, and an announcement on our new fMRI series. The sharing of neuroimaging data is an idea whose time has finally come, but many challenges remain.

Today we have a guest posting from F1000’s Iain Hrynaszkiewicz covering the topic of medical data sharing One of the world’s most influential medical journals recently highlighted data sharing as an important issue to be addressed if we are to improve the quality of reporting of biomedical research.