The last week of September 2016, several THOR partners headed to the city of churches, Krakow, to participate in the Digital Infrastructures for Research conference (DI4R). DI4R was an event organised by Europe’s leading e-infrastructures, EGI, EUDAT, GÉANT, OpenAIRE and the Research Data Alliance (RDA) Europe, in which researchers, developers and service providers brainstormed and discussed adoption of digital infrastructure services and

I just got back from the American Association for Corpus Linguistics conference in Ames, Iowa, and I’m calling the Word of the Year: for 2016 it will be said . You may think you know said . It’s the past participle of say . You’ve said it yourself many times.

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.

The Leader of the Curation Pack. At GigaScience we are keen to maximise the use and utility of our published data, narrative and other research objects.

I just got back from attending my second meeting of the Northeast Modern Language Association. My experience at both conferences has been very positive: friendly people, interesting talks, good connections. But I would like to see a little more linguistics at NeMLA, and better opportunities for linguists to attend. I’ve talked with some of the officers of the organization about this, and they have told me they welcome more papers from linguists.

The use of “big data” genomics technologies may gather most attention and funding in “big money” settings such as healthcare and agriculture, but due to a precipitous drop in cost its use has become increasingly ubiquitous in all corners of biological research, including biodiversity research and conservation.

**OPTIMising Genome Assembly **This month brings new additions to our exciting and on-going Optical Mapping series. Outside of a handful of key genomes, due to deficiencies in the short sequencing read lengths that have backed genome assembly, we lack reference genomes that are finished to high standards that can support comprehensive analyses.

Last Christmas we gave you our heart; okay forget George Michael – we gave you beautiful imaging data sets, Virtual Machines, BYO data parties, GigaGitHub, more open peer review plus much more.

Despite the precipitous drop in the price of DNA sequencing, global credit crunches have tightened the science budgets able to properly take advantage of the potential of genomics. While this plummet in cost has led to an explosion of “mega-sequencing” projects carried out by large international consortia, it has also democratized and empowered what can be done outside traditional academia and research funding environments.

I got back on Tuesday from OpenCon 2015 — the most astonishing conference on open scholarship. Logistically, it works very different from most conferences: students have their expenses paid, but established scholars have to pay a registration fee and cover their own expenses. That inversion of how things are usually done captures much of what’s unique about OpenCon: its focus on the next generation is laser-sharp.