Researchers release a treasure trove of data on the developing retina, pushing the boundaries of neuroscience publishing by presenting it dynamically and reproducibly. A new paper in GigaScience today demonstrates a major step forward for reproducible research and public data-sharing in the neurosciences with the publication and release of a huge cache of electrophysiology data resources.

Visualizations are becoming increasing important to graphically illustrate, understand, and glean insight from the explosion of larger and larger datasets in this supposed era of “big data”. Microbial ecology and the study of the microbiome is revolutionizing how we look at health, microorganism diversity and ecological interactions, but these studies are proving challenging to deal with the ever-expanding numbers of specimens sampled.

As big proponents of Open Data, on top of the many diverse datasets associated with GigaScience papers in our integrated GigaDB database, we are continuing to fill it with datasets produced by our BGI hosts.

Depositing data in GigaDB helps authors win BMC Open Data Award by boosting confidence in unexpected research findings Last night at the Beyond the Genome conference in San Francisco, researchers were presented with this year’s BioMed Central Open Data Award for their work demonstrating that DNA methylation occurs in the parasitic worm Trichinella spiralis , a human pathogen also known as “pork worm” due to it being

The speed of data Last week was the Bio-IT World Asia meeting in Singapore, and while we didn’t attend this year (see last years conference report in Genome Biology ), our editorial board member Tin-Lap Lee presented on the GigaGalaxy server that we have been collaborating with him on (see slides). Also timed for the meeting, Aspera made a press release on our recent adoption of their suite of software products to

With everyone in a reflective mood as the year comes to a close, one of the big scientific trends of 2012 has obviously been the high profile that open-access and more open methods of carrying out science has received.

As we enter a new month, we have to announce some personnel changes to GigaScience , as we welcome Nicole Nogoy to the team as a Commissioning Editor from her base in New Zealand. It is with sadness we also have to say goodbye to our Assistant Editor Alexandra Basford, who has just left us to take up new challenges in Japan.

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.

Lead by researchers at the University of Oxford, a group of more than 30 scientific organizations around the globe, have worked to produce a common standard that will make possible the consistent description of enormous and radically different databases compiled in fields ranging from genetics to stem cell science, to environmental studies.

As biological data is now produced faster than it can easily be handled and stored, the dissemination of this data has become a major bottleneck.