The 21st meeting of the Genomics Standards Consortium (GSC21) took place last week in Vienna at one of the oldest universities in the world – the University of Vienna – from May 20th-23rd.  We’ve been long time supporters and participants of the Genomics Standards Consortium meetings going back to 2012’s GSC13 in Shenzhen, and have also published a special series of GSC “Best Practice in Genomics Research” papers.

Yesterday, cOAlition S published their updated principles and implementation guidelines for #PlanS, together with the rationale behind the update. This constitutes a very much welcome effort, as evidence of the increasing awareness among funders as to their potential leverage in infrastructure modernization, at a time when institutions have apparently abandoned their faculty completely.

Scientists are used to vested interests disputing scientific claims. Tobacco corporations have tried to discredit the science about lung cancer and smoking, creationists keep raising always the same, long-debunked objections against evolution, climate-deniers claim the earth is cooling, anti-vaxxers believe the MMR vaccine causes autism and homeopaths delude themselves that a little drop of nothing has magical healing powers.

Just out in GigaScience is a new paper presenting Rice Galaxy, an open resource for plant science using the Galaxy workflow management system we are so fond of. The authors from the International Rice Research Institute in the Phillipines are winners of our 2018 ICG13 Prize, and as this is the final paper to be published we can now present a summary of the  competition.

The mock metagenome, MAGs and breaking the first rule of Long Read Club Nick showing us some of his experiments with an early antecedent Short Read Club… Out today in GigaScience is a new “mock metagenome” Data Note from the Nick Loman lab in Birmingham showcasing the latest long-read sequencing technologies from Oxford Nanopore.

The 12th International Biocuration Conference was held in Cambridge, UK from April 7-10th 2019. As regular participants of the meeting you can read our write-ups of the meeting going back to 2012. This is a forum for biocurators and developers to discuss their work and to promote collaboration.

With about 2 years delay, US President Donald Trump hired Kelvin Droegemeier as director for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in February 2019.

It’s DNA day, commemorating the publication of the structure of DNA in 1953, as well as the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003. Genomics has come a long way since then. Today it is possible to sequence whole genomes with a very reasonable investment of time and money. What an amazing time for scientists who are working with non-model organisms.

FAIRer Sharing via FAIRsharing Image from FAIRsharing.org. Our aim at GigaScience is to provide the means to open up and share research data. On top of just making these available via our (new look) GigaDB database, we’ve been involved with communities that wants to maximize the utility of these research outputs by making them FAIR: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable.

Just out in full text is a our first paper showcasing our latest complete integration with the Sketchfab 3D viewer. In this a 3D fossil seabed from the lower Devonian geologic period has been digitally reconstructed using micro X-ray computed tomography (microCT) imaging.