This week is International Open Access Week, and with the theme “It Matters How We Open Knowledge: Building Structural Equity”. This aims at highlighting the individual and collective action required alongside the decisions, actions, and investments in knowledge sharing to ensure that equity is foundational.

GigaScience has always had a focus on reproducibility rather than subjective impact, and it can be challenging for our reviewers to judge this, especially now that more and more tools are being created – bringing data science to the masses.  This also means more efficiency and ease is required especially when multiple collaborators and contributors on a specific project are involved.

This week we showcased a new way of peer reviewing software, testing code in an independent manner and providing a CODECHECK “certificate of reproducible computation” when the results in the paper can be reproduced.

**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.

The year is almost over and it’s time to review the highlights of GigaScience ’s 2017. “Draft genome of the reindeer (Rangifer tarandus)” Foto: Alexandre Buisse CC-BY-SA 3.0 2017 was as special year for GigaScience : a year of many firsts and we celebrated our 5th birthday! An occasion to look back – and forward, as we did in our anniversary editorial.