I was fortunate in being able to attend 18th Annual Meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM2012). It was a nice turnout, especially considering the long distances many of the attendees traveled to attend the conference in Beijing. Very exciting was the record number of Chinese delegates, a trend the organization would like to see continue in the future.

A correspondence we have contributed to has just been published in the BMC Research Notes “Data standardization, sharing and publication series” on the adventures in data-citation and data-release practices surrounding the Sorghum genome that is available in our GigaDB database and that was published last year in Genome Biology . We use Sorghum as an example to highlight the issues surrounding data release and use strong words,

Of the of the many issues needing addressing in this era of the so-called “data deluge” (apologies genomics bingo), on top of the well documented difficulties in computing power, bandwidth and storage keeping pace with data production, less attention has been paid on the efforts required to present and package this biological information to users.

Policies and Standards for Reproducible Research: from theory to practice This month GigaScience co-hosted a session at the Genomic Standards Consortium meeting in Shenzhen on “Policies and Standards for Reproducible Research: from theory to practice.

To tie in with this week’s Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC) meeting in Shenzhen, GigaScience is launching a call for submissions to a thematic series of discussion and research from the conference and wider community highlighting best practice in genomics research. As the 13th meeting of the GSC, the topic this year is “Genomes to Interactions to Communities to Models” – all areas key to the scope of the journal.

Another incremental step has been achieved for the adoption of the practice of data citation; this week, Nature Biotechnology has included one of our dataset DOIs in their references for the first time.

I recently returned from the InCoB/ISCB-Asia meeting. The meeting officially ended a couple of days ago but I am still digesting the good food, the good  conversations and the good science, all of which I know will be with me a good while.  In the interest of avoiding a copious monograph, I’ll try to stick to a few personal high points.

Another busy week for the GigaScience team, with the release of a new-look database, more datasets, and a number of talks and announcements at BGI’s annual International Conference of Genomics in Shenzhen.

After many months on the road visiting conferences it’s nice when one comes to you. This weekend marks BGI’s annual big bash: the 6th International Conference on Genomics, this year held in the mock-Swiss splendor of the Shenzhen OCT East resort.

This week marks another success for the fledgling practice of data citation, with two datasets from our GigaScience database published in Nature Biotechnology . The genomes sequenced by our colleagues at the BGI for the Cynomolgus and Chinese rhesus macaques were initially released DOIs at our launch in July, and were amongst the first (at the time) unpublished genomes released in this way.