GigaScience utilizes and promotes Open Science in all its forms, and one of the key areas in this ecosystem is Citizen Science – opening and democratising science to such an extent it is powered by public participation.

*A New High-Quality Reindeer Genome Sequence Provides Resources for Studying Evolution, Domestication, and Adaptation to Arctic Climate. But not the secrets of Christmas. * Ewan Birney has previously blogged on the Genome Days of Christmas, but today the full-text version of a particularly Christmassy species has just been published to add to that list.

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.

Following FAIR principles is good for your colleagues, it’s good for the community, and it’s good for science. But what’s in it for the researcher, in return for committing to open science?

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.

Sequencers versus the smugglers. CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora), is one of the largest and oldest conservation and sustainable use agreements in existence, and provides a legal framework for protecting endangered plants and animals around the world.

With the current annual data creation rate estimated to be in the tens of zettabytes, the flood of information currently being generated in every area of human life is crashing up against limited data storage solutions. However, DNA, which serves as a storage system for biological information, has been proposed as a potential means to store an unlimited amount of information.

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