So this is essentially what happened instead of us sitting down and thinking how we could spend our money in the most technologically savvy way to the benefit of science, scholars and society. A generation later, roughly US$300 billion poorer and none the wiser, it seems.

As publishers of a lot of plant and animal genomes, the biggest conference for this research community is the appropriately named Plant and Animal Genome Conference (PAG). We’ve attended a number of these giant meetings in their San Diego base, and in recent years they have been branching out to host satellites in Asia (PAG Asia, which last year included a workshop that we participated in). And we attended the 28 ^th edition of the

With much of the GigaScience team spanning the Hong Kong-Shenzhen border and now confined to remote working, the current 2019-novel coronavirus outbreak has been particularly disruptive and close to home.

Understanding and managing forests is crucial to understanding and potentially mitigating the effects of climate change, invasive species, and shifting land use on natural systems and human society. However, collecting data on individual trees in the field is expensive and time consuming, which limits the scales at which this crucial data is collected.

**Today, GigaScience published a report on the genome of a truly unique species: the giant squid Architeuthis dux . The elusive animal is the main character in ancient stories about sea monsters and it is known as “the kraken” in many legends. For a long time its mere existence was questionable, until, in 1857, the Danish naturalist Japetus Steenstrup made the link between those legends and the enormous cephalopod.

This is the last blog post of 2019 and it is time again to look back at some of the amazing research published in GigaScience over the past year. Besides handling manuscripts, reviews and data, the editors and curators also attended conferences near and far, they contributed to policy discussions and prepared the launch of a new journal, GigaByte. More about all these activities below.

The Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington DC was the venue for this year’s ASCB|EMBO 2019 Meeting that took place on 7-11 December 2019. The American Society of Cell Biology conference, now merged with the EMBO meeting, is the largest yearly gathering for the cell imaging community, and GigaScience has attended in the past.

For a number of years now, publishers who expect losing revenue in a transition to Open Access have been spreading fear about journals which claim to perform peer-review on submitted manuscripts, but then collect the publishing fee of a few hundred dollars (about 5-10% of what these legacy publishers charge) without performing any peer-review at all.

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.

EMBL Heidelberg was the venue for the EMBL Symposium: Seeing is Believing – Imaging the Molecular Processes of Life that took place on 9-12 October 2019. This was the second EMBL meeting on imaging data we attending this year after VIZBI (see the write-up here), GigaScience Data Scientist Chris Armit was there and was astonished at how recent breakthroughs in imaging technology are enlightening our understanding of the Life Sciences.