Timed for Peer Review Week 2023, we’d like to announce that GigaByte Journal has integrated a novel ‘Publish, Review, Curate’ (PRC) peer-review model, in partnership with eLife.

In our previous post we announced we are now archived in Rogue Scholar, a new service that provides full-text search, long-term archiving, DOIs and metadata for science blogs such as ours. In the process of going back through our more than 300 posts over 12-years of blogging we thought we would highlight our favourites.

GigaBlog is now archived in Rogue Scholar, a new service that provides what it calls “science blogging on steroids” through including full-text search, long-term archiving, DOIs and metadata for science blogs such as ours. While this July we celebrated the 11 ^th anniversary of the launch of our first articles at ISMB in Lyon, it was actually the 12 ^th anniversary of the launch of GigaBlog, the blog of GigaScience

Jeffrey “predatory journals” Beall famously catapulted himself out of any serious debate with an article in the journal TripleC, entitled “The Open-Access Movement is Not Really about Open Access”. In it, Beall claimed that OA proponents don’t care about access, but that they form an “anti-corporatist movement that wants to deny the freedom of the press to companies it disagrees with”. The article is so replete with similarly unhinged fairy

The model in this post is based on the one in Cameron et al. (2009), improving how seed dispersal is modelled and the dynamics are visualised. I have become a bit obsessed with hemiparasitic plants recently. When I found Cameron et al.’s paper on how Yellow Rattle can create interesting spatial dynamics in grasslands¹, I got quite excited. I have been learning python this year so I thought I may as well try to replicate their model.

The GSC23 international meeting was held in Bangkok, Thailand earlier this month (Aug 7-11th) and here we have an overview of this meeting. The Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC) is a volunteer-run non-profit organization set up nearly 20 years ago. At a time when “genomic” researchers were painstakingly producing near-complete genomes of just a few organisms.

A few days ago I wrote about scientific thinking as an antidote to intuition. Not just an alternative to it, but something like the opposite of intuition. The intentional, energy-consuming move to a systematic deliberative mode of thought is utterly different from the easy and instantaneous nature of intuition.

As I work on a book that will claim that evolution is easy, I have a parallel task of exploring the reasons we sense that it is hard or even impossible. Some of those influences are the result of efforts by religions to maintain dependence on supernaturalism or to defend ancient sacred writings. Some are the result of antipathy to science itself, framed in terms of culture war.

A few years ago, I somehow realized that I wanted to read more stories. My work as a journal editor involved hours of intense scientific reading every day, and my insatiable interest in biology meant that my recreational reading was almost exclusively about science. But I could remember how much I loved stories as a kid: Tom Sawyer , The Black Stallion , all the Roald Dahl things.

'Genome' is now a pretty standard word in our social vocabulary.