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.

This is the first of a new category of posts here at Jabberwocky Ecology called Research Summaries. We like the idea of communicating our research more broadly than to the small number of folks who have the time, energy, and interest to read through entire papers. So, for every paper that we publish we will (hopefully) also do a blog post communicating the basic idea in a manner targeted towards a more general audience.

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,

With genetics and genomics being complicated enough, epigenomics adds even more layers of control and regulation of gene expression, and high-throughput global analyses of epigenetic changes further add to the reams of biological information many people are already referring to as the “data-deluge”.

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.

Jeremy Fox over at the Oikos Blog has written an excellent piece explaining why fundamental, basic science, research is worth investing in, even when time and resources are limited. His central points include: Fundamental research is where a lot of our methodological advances come from. Fundamental research provides generally-applicable insights. Current applied research often relies on past fundamental research.

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.

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.

Another incremental step has been achieved for the adoption of the practice of data citation; this week, Nature Biotechnology has included one of our dataset DOIs in their references for the first time.