This November, the city of Niterói in Rio de Janeiro received the first edition of LATmetrics, an international conference dedicated to the advancement of altmetrics and open science research in Latin America. Bringing together researchers, science communicators, librarians, and other stakeholders, the event featured a diverse array of speakers on everything from social media metrics and open data to the impact of science in society.

Join us for the next Open Science Beers YVR Thursday, March 14, 2019 6 PM – 9 PM The Emerald (555 Gore Ave) About Open Science Beers YVR During last year’s FORCE11 conference, the idea was born to recreate Montreal’s popular Open Science Beers event right here in our very own Vancouver. Now, that idea has become a reality. Each month, we’re bringing together friends of Open Science* for a casual evening of drinks and conversation.

On the occasion of the first “BigDataDay” at our university, I have summarized on the below poster our two main efforts to automate the publication of our tiny raw data. On the left is our project automating Buridan data deposition at FigShare using the ROpenSci plugin and the consequence of just sending the links to the data and the evaluation code to a publisher, instead of pixel-based figures, when submitting a paper.

Open Science Trek, The Next Integration Fostering and promoting more open and transparent science is one of the goals of GigaScience , and to do this we have been big promoters of open peer review as well as preprints servers. Combining both of these, Academic Karma was the one of the first platforms to focus on open review of preprints, and has helped facilitate this over the past 3 years.

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?

A growing community of scientists from a variety of disciplines is moving the norms of scientific research toward open practices. Supporters of open science hope to increase the quality and efficiency of research by enabling the widespread sharing of datasets, research software source code, publications, and other processes and products of research.

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.

We are pleased to welcome our Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Dan Sholler. Dan is an expert in qualitative research (yes, you read that correctly) and studies digital infrastructure creation, growth, and maintenance efforts. Through this research interest, he was drawn to the open science community and its ongoing development of tools and communities to support sustainable, reproducible, high-quality research.