We are excited to announce the recent release of metagenomics annotations for Europe PMC publications. Thanks to the machine learning framework of Dr. Maaly Nassar for the joint EMERALD project between Europe PMC and MGnify teams, recognising metagenomics key terms in literature can now provide detailed biome descriptions for unravelling microbial implications in a variety of environmental-, engineered- and host-associated phenomena.

With somewhat depressing regularity I keep cycling back to things I was working on earlier but never quite get to work the way I wanted.

This month, Europe PMC released a new version of SciLite, a powerful tool for highlighting annotations in life sciences publications. SciLite is powered by the Europe PMC annotation platform via the open annotation API, which provides access to over 1.3 billion annotations.

Stuck indoors and bored of passively reading information on the coronavirus (and more) when you could be doing something more constructive? GigaScience now has hypothes.is integration for collaborative annotation, and we would encourage readers to interact with our content more collaboratively.

[From algorithms to the bench]{style=“color: #666666; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 15pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;”} [Text-mining holds the promise of helping researchers to overcome information overload. It is a familiar premise: an avalanche of scientific knowledge is being produced and shared.

[Scientific communication does not stop at the moment of publication. Scientific discussions in the form of post-publication peer review can provide valuable insights for published articles, bring up an alternative research perspective, or even present updates for published research.

[We are excited to announce the launch of Europe PMC Annotations API, which provides programmatic access to annotations text-mined from biomedical abstracts and open access full text articles. The Annotations API is a part of Europe PMC’s programmatic tools suit and is freely available on the Europe PMC website: ]{style=“font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt;

**Over 200 participants spent three eventful days in Berlin last week to discuss ideas, ongoing projects and future developments around Open Science. As an appropriate location to demonstrate the benefits of breaking down barriers, the motto of FORCE2017 was “Changing the culture”. While most of the GigaScience team was in Shenzhen for ICG, Hans Zauner was on hand in what is one of our favourite meetings.

Cheering Ourselves up with CUDDEL(s) and Hackathons We have been working closely with the Metabolomics community for a few years now, participating in hackathon events including BYO Data parties and Hack-the-Spec – ISA as a FAIR research object – thanks to our collaboration with the ISA Team at the Oxford e-Research Centre and funding from our BBSRC UK-China partnering award.

[Manual curation is vital for maintaining quality information in biological databases. However, with the exponential growth in biological data this approach is both challenging and time consuming. We wanted to create a scalable and sustainable process which could complement manual curation.  ]{style=“color: #494949; font-family: "open sans" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;”}[ ]{style=“color: #494949;