Last month was the 7th consecutive year we’ve attended our co-publisher BGI’s annual ICG (International Conference on Genomics) gathering in Shenzhen.

**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.

Last week marked peer review week, an event we’ve followed since the inaugural event in 2015 (which you can see from our previous blog). Like next months Open Access Week, this is a great opportunity to throw some light on what goes on “under the hood” in academic publishing, as well as encourage innovation and uptake of more open and transparent research practices.

*As a journal focussed on open science we are big promoters of research parasites (and research on parasites), and try to feeds them with open data and tools. It is therefore appropriate this is the second year GigaScience has supported and sponsored the Research Parasite awards.

Every summer we celebrate our birthday at the ISMB (Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology) conference, and this was a particularly memorable and important one – being the 5 ^th birthday of GigaScience, and 25 ^th edition of the ISMB. Having ISMB in Prague this year, the historic capital of old Bohemia was particularly appreciated by the attendees, both for its beautiful baroque streets, and its reputation as a

GigaScience is always trying to push the boundaries of how we disseminate reproducible research, and to adapt to the challenges of dealing with experiments become more data-intensive.

**Call for Submissions – Win Prizes and Join us in Shenzhen for ICG-12 ** Being co-published by BGI and based at their Hong Kong office we are regular participants at their yearly ICG (International Conference on Genomics) conference in Shenzhen. Since the very first meeting in 2006, ICG has grown to become one of the most influential annual meetings in ‘omics’ research, and is now in its 12th edition.

Authors can now submit their bioRxiv preprints directly to GigaScience via the biorXiv platform, at the push of a button. This handy technical integration is another hallmark of biology preprints becoming a normal, accepted, and speedy way of communicating research results. Pre-prints, versions of a scholarly paper that precede formal publication in a peer-reviewed journal are  becoming increasingly mainstream.

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.

Forget Movember – with all the cool open brain science activities happening at GigaScience and the upcoming Society for Neuroscience (SfN) 2016 meeting in San Diego (November 12-16), we are naming it Neuro-November!