UPDATE: The deadline for the call has been extended until the 30th June.

UPDATE: GigaByte and GBIF webinar video added below.

Web tools and FAIR principles at the core of Life Science publishing in GigaDB As we continue to push the envelope for publishing in the life sciences we have been listening to our users about the things that should be incorporated into the publication process.

A new portrait of Obama shows a spineless, slimy, gutter dweller, and in GigaScience today we give you unprecedented insight into what makes them tick. Don’t worry, we haven’t encroached upon Fox News to provide partisan political commentary for the US elections, we are talking about the Obama genus of leaf-shaped Planerians from South America.

Seek and Deploy. If you’re a user of GigaDB (and why wouldn’t you be!) you’ll perhaps have been wondering why the search function is so slow and often missing obvious results! Well even if you’re not wondering, I can tell you that this has now been fixed.

Today we have a guest posting from F1000’s Iain Hrynaszkiewicz covering the topic of medical data sharing One of the world’s most influential medical journals recently highlighted data sharing as an important issue to be addressed if we are to improve the quality of reporting of biomedical research.

Last week we published our first neuroscience data note containing 10GB of fMRI data hosted and integrated into the paper by a DOI to our GigaDB database. While we have published a number of genomics datasets and data notes (see the Puerto Rican Parrot genome data note and its associated data DOI), this is a nice example of us providing a home for “orphan data”, the long tail of data types without community agreed curated repositories.

Regular reader of this blog will be aware of our efforts to promote data citation using digital object identifiers (DOIs), and this week, alongside Rebecca Lawrence from F1000 Research and Kevin Ashley from the Digital Curation Centre, our Editor in Chief Laurie Goodman has a correspondence in Nature strongly making this case.

The worm that turned (epigenetics) GigaDB, GigaScience ’s associated database, has had a number of new datasets just added, many for data types previously not hosted. Today marks the publication of new research in our sister BMC journal Genome Biology shaking up the epigenetics field by shattering the assumption that DNA methylation is absent in nematodes.

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.