Looking back at this unusual COVID-dominated year, we are happy to report that GigaScience not only kept going under difficult circumstances, publishing outstanding examples of Big Data science and introducing innovations in the review process.

There has been some outrage at the announcement that Nature is following through with their 2004 declaration of charging ~10k ($/€) in article processing charges (APCs). However, not only have these charges been 16 years in the making but the original declaration was made not on some obscure blog, but at a UK parliamentary inquiry. So nobody could rightfully claim that we couldn’t have seen this development coming from miles away.

The first comprehensive mobile genome analysis application, iGenomics, is now available for download and use on an iOS smartphone . By pairing an smartphone with a handheld DNA sequencer, users will be able to create a mobile genetics laboratory, reminiscent of the Star Trek’s “tricorder”. Just published is an article presenting  iGenomics, the first DNA sequencing toolkit that can run on a smartphone.

Last week, there was a lot of outrage at the announcement of Nature’s new pricing options for their open access articles. People took to twitter to voice their, ahem, concern. Some examples: There are many more that all express their outrage at the gall of Nature to charge their authors these sums,. even Forbes interviewed some of them.

With the recent launch of our new GigaByte journal you may have noticed some interesting genome datasets being published, including the banjo frog, common dragonet fish, and extremely rare Nyssa yunnanensis tree. Joining these species on the genomics tree of life this month is a small mouse-like marsupial called the brown antechinus.

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

We have a Q&A with author Matthieu Foll from the WHO International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) on his new GigaScience paper presenting multi-omic data from rare lung neuroendocrine neoplasms and his experience having the precious Controlled Access data peer reviewed by named peer reviewers. As a journal focused on reproducibility of research GigaScience has a strict open-science policy, meaning

Just before Christmas 2019, the Washington Post reported, based on “people familiar with the matter”, that the US Justice Department were investigating the Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan for potentially “working with Russian intelligence to steal U.S. military secrets from defense contractors”. Besides such a highly unusual connection, the article also reiterated unsubstantiated (but mainly circulated by publishers) allegations that access

The Human Cell Atlas is a consortium that aims to “create comprehensive reference maps of all human cells—the fundamental units of life—as a basis for both understanding human health and diagnosing, monitoring, and treating disease.” I first met with consortium members of the Human Cell Atlas at the Human BioMolecular Atlas Program Common Coordinates Framework Workshop based at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, USA in December 2017.

Scientists in Cambodia, who are supported by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, and the Bill &