For the better part of a year, I have been looking for an opportunity to use the rOpenSci package deposits in myrole as the Data Librarian at EcoHealth Alliance.I had done some initial testing with Mark Padgham, the brilliant person who developed this package, but there weren’t any projects ready for me to put deposits through its paces.Enter the Rift Valley Fever Virus in South Africa project, a ten year, multiple part study of humans,

Marking the 10 ^th anniversary of the formulation of the FAIR principles, we have one of our GigaBlog Q&A’s with Peter-Bram ’t Hoen, Alain van Gool, Anna Niehues and Casper de Visser from the Netherlands X-omics Initiative and Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, authors of a new paper on publishing FAIR workflows.

Hi everyone, did you ever wonder how FAIR data is put into practice? This week I went down the rabbit hole and what I brought back is the start of a new series to unravel the many FAIR data initiatives . There are also some good news for (Belgian) FAIR data in my work update!

As part of the FAIRsharing Community Network (see previous blog) and joint Force11 and Research Data Alliance (RDA) FAIRsharing Working Group we have been involved in efforts to develop a shared, cross-publisher list of recommended data deposition repositories. The first fruits of these are a preprint from the working group and DataCite (of which we are also members) summarising what we feel should be the key criteria for selection.

The 21st meeting of the Genomics Standards Consortium (GSC21) took place last week in Vienna at one of the oldest universities in the world – the University of Vienna – from May 20th-23rd.  We’ve been long time supporters and participants of the Genomics Standards Consortium meetings going back to 2012’s GSC13 in Shenzhen, and have also published a special series of GSC “Best Practice in Genomics Research” papers.

FAIRer Sharing via FAIRsharing Image from FAIRsharing.org. Our aim at GigaScience is to provide the means to open up and share research data. On top of just making these available via our (new look) GigaDB database, we’ve been involved with communities that wants to maximize the utility of these research outputs by making them FAIR: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable.

Following FAIR principles is good for your colleagues, it’s good for the community, and it’s good for science. But what’s in it for the researcher, in return for committing to open science?

Every summer we celebrate our birthday at the ISMB (Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology) conference, and this was a particularly memorable and important one – being the 5 ^th birthday of GigaScience, and 25 ^th edition of the ISMB. Having ISMB in Prague this year, the historic capital of old Bohemia was particularly appreciated by the attendees, both for its beautiful baroque streets, and its reputation as a