At GigaScience as our focus is on reproducibility rather than subjective impact, it can be challenging at times to judge this in our papers. Targeting the “bleeding edge” of data-driven research, more and more of our papers utilise technologies, such as Jupyter notebooks, Virtual Machines, and Containers such as Docker.

Citizen Science at UNEA4 As GigaScience has the aim of opening and democratising science as far as it can go, we even work towards the involvement of non-professional “citizen scientists” in the scientific process.

Dr Yang Tuo collecting in Ruili, CC-BY Our Biggest Dataset Yet. Oh, Ruili? A new Data Note provides genome sequencing data that effectively triples the number of plant species with available genome data.

We at GigaScience are pleased to have won the 2018 the PROSE Award for Innovation in Journal Publishing in the multidisciplinary category, as innovation has been a key element in our goal to change how scientific publishing is done. The Association of American Publishers (AAP) has been giving awards for 42 years to recognize distinguished professional and scholarly books, reference works, journals.

GigaScience utilizes and promotes Open Science in all its forms, and one of the key areas in this ecosystem is Citizen Science – opening and democratising science to such an extent it is powered by public participation.

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.

Passiflora , commonly known as Passion Vines or Passion Flowers is a genus encompassing around 500 species, all of which exhibit such huge variation in leaf shape.  To further understand the unique diversity of Passiflora leaves, a recent paper published in GigaScience , presents a morphometric analysis and unique open dataset encompassing over 3,300 leaves from 40 different Passiflora species.

Not many tree species are iconic enough to have inspired Goethe love poems, but the distinctive and beautiful heart shaped leaves of ginkgo have made it a popular symbol in art and design. Coming from East Asia and having a long association with Buddhist temples and parks in China, Korea and Japan, it was thought to be extinct in the wild and only in more recent times were small wild populations identified in mountain groves in South West China.

Open data is a critical component of the scientific method, but genomes are both identifiable and predictive.

Imagine you would like to study a plant species of interest, say for its ability to supply food, fiber, fuel or just to gain a deeper scientific understanding. Two approaches immediately come to mind: an understanding of its underlying genetics and an understanding of plant phenomics, which spans how the genes express themselves across huge length scales from the microscopic to the whole plant itself.