I have, for a while, been frustrated and annoyed by the behavior of several of the large for-profit publishers.

I recently returned from the InCoB/ISCB-Asia meeting. The meeting officially ended a couple of days ago but I am still digesting the good food, the good  conversations and the good science, all of which I know will be with me a good while.  In the interest of avoiding a copious monograph, I’ll try to stick to a few personal high points.

Another busy week for the GigaScience team, with the release of a new-look database, more datasets, and a number of talks and announcements at BGI’s annual International Conference of Genomics in Shenzhen.

After many months on the road visiting conferences it’s nice when one comes to you. This weekend marks BGI’s annual big bash: the 6th International Conference on Genomics, this year held in the mock-Swiss splendor of the Shenzhen OCT East resort.

I logged into one of my reviewer accounts at a Wiley journal this morning and was greeted by a redirect that took me to a page with the following message: Asking someone who is already working for you for free if it’s OK to also try to sell them stuff while they’re doing it seems like a pretty good definition of classless to me.

This week marks another success for the fledgling practice of data citation, with two datasets from our GigaScience database published in Nature Biotechnology . The genomes sequenced by our colleagues at the BGI for the Cynomolgus and Chinese rhesus macaques were initially released DOIs at our launch in July, and were amongst the first (at the time) unpublished genomes released in this way.

We at GigaScience always appreciate good press, and on top of the welcome coverage on blogs (e.g. this in Annals of Botany) and twitter, we are pleased with the profile of the journal in this months Bio-IT world (especially coming on top of the coverage of our database in the previous issue). The article is a nice introduction to the editors, editorial policies, and hopes for the journal, and is useful reading for those who’d

With the summers conference season over, GigaScience are still keeping mobile, and this week Laurie is taking in “Beyond the Genome”, our BioMed Central stablemates Genome Biology and Genome Medicine meeting in Washington

As those of you who have been paying attention well know, I am currently attending this year’s International Conference on Systems Biology (#ICSB) meeting in either Heidelberg or Mannheim (there’s ongoing debate about the meeting locale). The meeting opened yesterday with a plenary talk by Jean Peccoud talking about DNA “grammar,” making linguistic models of yeast cell cycle regularly network genetics, and the open source application (with a

Working at a data center as big as the BGI, and launching a journal focused on maximizing data use, we have followed the many calls over the years for improved incentives and methods to aid and reward scientists in spending the considerable time and effort to share their data.