This end-of-the-year festive summary is different from previous ones:  For the first time, we can look back at a full publication year of our new baby, GigaByte journal. The older sibling GigaScience will also get the attention it deserves, before celebrating its 10th birthday in 2022. Let’s first have a look at how the new family member is doing.

As an Open Science journal, one of the main aims of GigaScience has always been to break down barriers. Both in the access of research and the underlying data and code supporting it, and the barriers holding back the researchers themselves. See our recent Review centering on inclusivity on the organization of meetings to see how it is important from an Open Science perspective.

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.

We are proud to announce Prof Zhang Yongzhen winner the 2020 ICG-15 GigaScience Prize for Outstanding Data Sharing during the COVID-19 Pandemic . Last month was the 10th consecutive year we’ve attended our co-publisher BGI’s annual ICG (International Conference on Genomics) gathering, and the third time we have presented a prize at the meeting. This years award was for Dr. Zhang’s outstanding efforts in sharing the first

C19RapidReview: cross publisher collaboration against the coronavirus pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic has created a new urgency to openly and rapidly share and review relevant research, with the world looking to science to solve the problems we currently face. While we’ve written about constructive things you can do while in lockdown, there are many more things you can’t do while locked out of the lab.

New genomic data from five birds-of-paradise reveal genes that are shaped by selection and help explain the origin of their spectacular plumage. Birds-of-paradise, with their elaborate and colorful feathers and their complex courtship displays, are a school-book example of sexual selection.

View towards the National Wine Centre of Australia (conference venue) from the Adelaide Botanic Garden Having just attended our first plant phenomics conference – it was great to learn how far the field has progressed and how rapidly it continues to progress with the advancement of new technologies for high-throughput phenotyping.

With the upcoming 5th International Plant Phenotyping Symposium (IPPS) set to take place Oct 2-5, in Adelaide, Australia, we look at how the plant phenotyping community has progressed over the last decade and how we can potentially address the issues surrounding data sharing, re-use, and reproducible research. As we live in an increasingly data-driven era, the genomics community has, in particular, a long history of sharing data to

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.

Authors can now submit their bioRxiv preprints directly to GigaScience via the biorXiv platform, at the push of a button. This handy technical integration is another hallmark of biology preprints becoming a normal, accepted, and speedy way of communicating research results. Pre-prints, versions of a scholarly paper that precede formal publication in a peer-reviewed journal are  becoming increasingly mainstream.