Opening a Cabinet of Curiosities in Montreal Readers of this blog must know every summer the GigaScience Press team gathers at the ISMB (International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology) conference, where the great and good of computational biology gather for the largest bioinformatics conference of the year.

Live and in-person in Madison A big part of the life of a journal editor is to travel to conferences, keeping on top of the state-of-the art of fields of interest, as well as interacting the research community that publishes, edits and peer reviews for your journal.

Join the Open Data club. Every year we catch up with fellow enthusiasts of open data, open source and open science at BOSC, the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference that is a Special Interest Group of the ISCB’s annual ISMB conference. This year there is an interesting juxtaposition with the location, being held at the Disney World resort in Orlando.

Editors: Mark Wass (University of Kent, UK), Iddo Friedberg (Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, USA), Predrag Radivojac (Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA) Last July, GigaScience and the organisers of the Automated Function Prediction special interest group at ISMB announced an upcoming series on Automated Function Prediction.

Type any scientific term into any search engine and its pretty much guaranteed that a Wikipedia article will be the first hit.

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.

So that’s ISMB over for another year. The worlds computational biologists are now sleeping off their Austrian wine and Sacher Torte hangovers on flights back home, hopefully inspired and brimming with fresh ideas for the next year. On the whole it seemed a productive and positive meeting, and whilst personal perspectives always differ depending on the tracks attended, there did seem to be several recurring themes.

In this era of “big-data” and supposed data-tsunamis, being able to sift through the vast swathes of information and find what you are looking will become more and more important.

After the launch of the GigScience website last week, and a call for papers this week, it’s now time to start  meeting and talking with potential authors. After a busy batch of conferences hosted by the BGI, including the  first meeting of the Earth Microbiome Project (see the slides and video of our talk) and last weeks Bio-IT APAC

I am probably supposed to be writing up some weighty blog post on some issue of importance but this is much more fun. Last year’s International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) kicked off one of the first major live blogging exercises in a mainstream biology conference. It was so successful that the main instigators were invited to write up the exercise and the conference in a paper in PLoS Comp Biol.