As a project with the aim of revolutionizing data dissemination and use, on top of promoting open-access and open-data, open-source is a key part of the open-science equation, and this week GigaScience has been at the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC2012 – program here) in Long Beach.

Research papers have been the predominant form of scholarly communication for the past few centuries, and despite moves towards online publication and open access, the process and structure of publication has not fundamentally changed in that time.

It’s that time of year again when the new Impact Factor values are released. This is such a big deal to a lot of folks that it’s pretty hard to avoid hearing about it. We’re not the sort of folks that object to the use of impact factors in general – we are scientists after all and part of being a scientist is quantifying things.

Readers of this blog will be well versed on our and others work using DataCite Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to cite data, and this months DataCite summer meeting in Copenhagen was a good opportunity to take stock of the many recent developments in the area of data publication, with the last six months being particularly busy with the number of new data platforms and data journals announced.

When last we left our intrepid scientists, they were starting to ponder the changes that might result from the new pre-proposal process. In general, we really like the new system because it helps reviewers focus on the value of big picture thinking and potentially reduces the overall workload of both grant writing and grant reviewing.

Before we start, this post refers to posts already written on this topic. To make sure no one gets lost, please follow the sequence of operations below: Step 1: Do you know about the new pre-proposal process at NSF?

Are you interested in stoichiometry? Energy flow through individuals, communities or ecosystems? Implications of organismal physiology? Do you like macroecology? Field experiments? Lab experiments? Theory? Are you particularly interested in integrating various combinations of the above?

In a busy summer for meetings, this month we attended and presented at Bio-IT World Asia conference in Singapore. In this era of more globalized biology, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the usually Boston based conference series, with Bio-IT World substituted their usual New England lobster for Chili Crab and heading east.

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.

Ethan and I have been watching the emergence of crowdfunding in science with great interest. We meant to blog about it, but our rate of blog idea generation is >> our rate of blog writing.