Quick thoughts on the recent announcement by figshare and F1000 about the new journals being launched on the F1000 Research site. The articles being published have data sets embedded as figshare widgets in the body of the text, instead of being, say, a static table. For example, the article:has a widget that looks like this:You can interact with this widget to view the data.

Over the weekend I saw this great tweet: Personal publishing policy for the PhD: always submit to http://t.co/dE2HMGlP and only publish (as 1st author) in arXiv-friendly journals. — P Desjardins-Proulx (@phdpqc) July 14, 2012 by Philippe Desjardins-Proulx and was pleased to see yet another actively open young scientist.

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.

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.

People find blog posts in different ways. Some visit the website regularly, some subscribe to email updates, and some subscribe using the blog’s feed. Feeds can be a huge time saver for processing the ever increasing amount of information that science generates, by placing much of that information in a single place in a simple, standardized, format.

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.